![]() Welcome to 1979, a Nashville recording, mastering, and cutting studio, gets most of its lacquers for 12-inch LPs from MDC, but relied on Apollo for seven-inch lacquers. But it’s the cutters who will feel the most direct hit. (A more in-depth breakdown of the entire process is available via Virginia’s Furnace Record Pressing.)Īs such, the loss of Apollo will have repercussions up and down the vinyl supply chain. Lacquers are shipped to cutters, who cut the audio grooves into the lacquer and use it to make a “master” plate, which is then used to make the stampers that are sent to pressing plants, where they’re used to finally produce a vinyl disc. The physical production of vinyl begins with the kind of blank lacquer disc Apollo produced: A heavily polished aluminum plate coated in a solution similar to nail polish that’s soft enough to be cut. I think this is going to be a storm we have to weather.” But I’m actually optimistic in the long-term future. “If a plant went down, I would say the same thing. “It’s a devastating blow, because it’s part of the family,” Sean Rutowski of Independent Record Pressing, in New Jersey, says of Apollo. No specific details have been announced yet, but there are plans in motion to fill the critical void Apollo has left, according to multiple people in the industry.īut amid the sorrow, chaos, confusion, and uncertainty of the past few weeks, there’s a cautious hope driving the people in one of music’s most resilient corners. There’s also been plenty of talk about what must happen next. The vinyl-manufacturing community is tightknit, and within hours of the Apollo fire, phones were ringing in pressing and lacquer-cutting plants around the country as people scrambled to reassure clients and reconsider their production schedules for the next few months. ![]() The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System I think there are going to be pressing plants that close because of this.… We’ve been saying we need to fix this for years. “We’ve gotten together with all the other pressing plants, lacquer cutters, everybody, and been like, ‘What happens if MDC or Apollo goes away? We’re all fucked.’ We were dreading that day, but not thinking it would actually happen - that before anything disastrous happened, someone would come in and fix what needed to be fixed.… Now, is the sky falling? No. “We’ve all been worried about this, we’ve had meetings about it within the industry,” says Cash Carter, chief operating officer at Kindercore Vinyl Pressing in Athens, Georgia. There is now just one such factory in the world capable of producing that crucial item, MDC in Japan, leaving the global supply of vinyl in peril. ![]() No one was harmed, but the fire obliterated the Banning, California, facility responsible for, by most estimates, 70 to 85 percent of the lacquer plates used in vinyl production. The blaze reportedly took 82 firefighters and three hours to extinguish. Earlier this month, Apollo Masters Corp., one of the two places in the world that produce the lacquer discs needed to assemble master plates for pressing records, burned down. The day that everyone in the vinyl-manufacturing world has been worried about for years finally arrived. ![]()
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