A look inside P-Vine's record pressing factory, VINYL GOES AROUND PRESSING - Part 1

Talk of record pressing plants only started to come up around 2021. About 15 years ago, there was a revival of records, and special releases began to appear at events such as Record Store Day Japan.

In the early 2010s, P-VINE still mostly released CDs, but gradually the demand for vinyl records started to increase. However, revivals are a universal phenomenon, and overseas pressing plants were overwhelmed with orders, so they often couldn't deliver on time.

There are record pressing factories in Japan, such as Toyo Kasei and Sony. However, even if you order officially, there is a waiting list at every facility. Even now, I think it takes about a year from order to delivery. If it's a reissue of a past catalog work, we can adjust the release date, but for new releases, we want to release them at the same time as the CD.

Even if we placed an order with an overseas pressing factory, it would take about six months. By the time the record arrived, it was no longer new. So we started a project to build our own pressing factory.

I was often dissatisfied with the sound quality of the records that came out of the outsourced pressing plant, let alone the delivery time. I wanted to solve all the problems related to records.

The decline in sound quality of newly released records, from new releases to reissues, has been a major problem. I've been buying records for many years, and I've found that few newly pressed records have sound quality that I'm satisfied with.

Let me explain a little about the record manufacturing process. First, a musician records and creates a master recording. This recording is then played back and sent to a cutting machine. During this process, an electrical signal causes a needle to vibrate. Because this needle is heated, the vibrations are engraved into the lacquer disc as grooves.

There is only one lacquer disc, so it won't be enough for mass production. So we transfer it to nickel-plated paper to create a metal master disc. We then create a stamper, which is a copy of that disc, that we use to press the actual record. Since it's mass-producible, we attach it to a press machine to make the record.

Of course, producing lacquer discs and metal masters is difficult and time-consuming, but now that we can press records in-house, we can significantly shorten the time it takes to release a record.

Cutting a lacquer disc is an incredibly delicate process, with engineers checking each and every groove using a digital microscope. Even so, problems can still occur. For example, grooves containing loud sounds, such as the chorus or solo parts of a song, can end up being thicker.

I think that's what musicians want to hear, but if the grooves are too thick, they can come into contact with adjacent grooves and cause the needle to skip. Also, if the grooves are too close together, there's a chance that noise will occur. In short, it's easy to create a record that will be the subject of complaints.

In recent years, there have been fewer records with skipping sounds, but there are also fewer records with high-quality sound that reflect the individuality of the music itself. There are no records with a thick, gutsy sound at all. I think that, as they responded to complaints about skipping and noise, they started cutting the grooves smaller at some point. Cutting for fear of complaints results in mediocre sound quality. That's why they have such a bad reputation.

I think that for black music and dance music, having a strong bass is paramount, and a lot of pressing plants have given up on that.

The level (sound pressure) is low. There's no sound coming out where it should. As a record lover, what scares me most is when people say, "If the sound quality is flat, then CDs are fine, right?" (laughs).

It's no exaggeration to say that we started VINYL GOES AROUND PRESSING to overcome this dilemma. We strive to thoroughly recreate the sound that musicians themselves want to produce.

Before building the factory, I looked into purchasing routes for press machines and shrink machines, and the installation of peripheral equipment, but there was no information on the Internet, probably because it was a trade secret. So, I made a lot of unreasonable requests of Masuda, who is in sales, in order to train him to become the factory manager (laughs). He responded brilliantly.

There were no wholesale companies selling current equipment such as pressing machines... After much searching, I finally found a company that sold my current machines. It took about three months for it to arrive by sea from overseas. All the equipment was in pieces, and didn't look like record-making equipment, so the customs officer was quite suspicious.

We returned to the factory and assembled the equipment. Of course, peripheral equipment such as boilers and cooling systems was also required. Based on the blueprints, we consulted with the boiler engineer and carpenters. Of course, it was the first time for anyone to build a press factory, so they said things like, "The manufacturer's blueprints may say so, but that's definitely not true!" (laughs).

Since we couldn't make a decision here, we decided to take a leap and trust the Japanese master craftsmen. The craftsmen's intuition was truly amazing. Although the products they made were different, they used their experience to properly maintain the product.

The staff from the machine sales company came to Japan for two weeks to give us a lecture, and they were amazed at the quality of the equipment. You might think that buying the latest equipment would mean automation, but in the end it's still mostly manual work. The quality of the record is affected by factors like temperature and humidity, so daily adjustments are required.

Even after the lecture was over and I returned home, Masuda was in contact with me almost every day, asking questions like, "There's noise, what should I do?" But he still helped me out, so I was grateful.

Whenever I had a question via email, he would connect with me remotely and give me advice. He was constantly making fine adjustments to the equipment.

The process of pressing records is analog, and ultimately all done by hand. It's not over once you press a button. Even if it's the same work, if you change the stamper, it won't press the same way again, so you have to make fine adjustments again.

The settings have to be changed depending on the temperature and humidity, and you have to work steadily and rely on the instincts of a craftsman. I thought that buying new equipment would make things easier, but that wasn't the case at all. Masuda found it so difficult that he ended up moving to a nearby neighborhood (laughs).

I remember the staff at the machine sales company praising the care they took in pressing the records and their enthusiasm for making records with great sound quality, as well as the ingenuity of the craftsmen who installed the piping and equipment. Apparently, their American business partners never saw such high-quality craftsmanship, so they commented, "We should emphasize that it's made in Japan more!" So we immediately decided to include "Made in Japan" in the VINYL GOES AROUND PRESSING logo.

We will still need to continue trial and error, but I think there is potential for this to be a record that can only be made in Japan.