Manufacturing Vinyl Records in the Digital Age
USA Today has a great story about a company in California that is doing well re-pressing pre-digital recordings from their old master tapes onto modern virgin high-quality vinyl.
“Just listen to that,” says mastering engineer Shawn Britton as the original analog tape of Jones’ 34-year-old studio session fills the equipment-packed room with the singer’s lush sighs. “It’s what music is really all about.”
What Britton and Mobile Fidelity are all about is taking such pre-digital master tapes and transferring them once again to vinyl, that 12-inch petroleum-based grooved platter that was famously delicate (woe if it got a skip-making scratch), inconvenient (side ends, get up, flip it, sit back down) and bulky (sizable collections ate up rooms).
In this iPod era, watching folks cut new LPs — that’s Long Playing, MP3 peeps — is a bit like visiting a vibrant Model T factory. But Mobile Fidelity’s retro business is brisk these days; Britton can barely keep up with the priceless masters from the likes of Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan that fill his in-box, and the shiny black fruits of his labors sell for between $25 and $50 a pop.
There’s a cool video that shows how all this is done, too. Watch it here.
