In 2014, after making about seven or eight CDs, Dustin Blocker wanted to make his first vinyl record. “We recorded the whole thing just for vinyl,” the frontman for Texas band Exit 380 says. Getting the record pressed took around six months. Since then, as many other labels and bands can certainly attest, the lead times for vinyl pressings haven’t exactly grown shorter.
The problem has been one of supply and demand, with demand for vinyl records in recent years outpacing manufacturers’ capacity to supply them. Vinyl’s return as a niche item has been long-heralded (to the point it’d feel trite to use a phrase like “broken record”), but still, it’s striking that the format’s sales last year, as tracked by the RIAA, rose to their highest level since 1988. But vinyl’s waning popularity from the 1980s through the early 2000s has left the world’s few dozen remaining record-pressing plants to meet this surging demand with antique, labor-intensive equipment that must be scrounged and rehabbed.
Now, Blocker is about to become a guinea pig for one of the latest developments in the vinyl resurgence: brand-new record presses. Dallas’ Hand Drawn Pressing, where Blocker is chief marketing officer, has signed on to buy new vinyl presses built by Viryl Technologies. Their new plant is expected to be fully operational by late fall or early winter, with a target of pressing about 1 million records a year; this would not be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that only 15 to 20 plants are operational stateside.
Meanwhile, Jack White’s Third Man Records and others are also readying equipment beyond the refurbished vintage gear that’s the vinyl-manufacturing norm. More of this and record plants eventually may become less backlogged—though, in keeping with vinyl’s languid appeal in the instant age, any progress looks likely to be gradual and slow.
Jay Millar, the former marketing director at Nashville’s United Record Pressing (the country's biggest plant) who’s now at reissue-oriented label Sundazed Music, agrees that the arrival of new presses could open up vinyl’s bottleneck, at least incrementally. “Think of a lawnmower from the ’50s to a lawnmower now, both are combustion engines that do the same thing, one’s just more reliable and efficient,” he says. “It’s ultimately going to chop at production times and slowly bring things back to where they were. Ten years ago you could get records in a month, now it’s probably four. This is just getting us closer to one month again—but not much closer.” Meet the new presses—just a touch better than the old presses?
Hand Drawn Pressing is Viryl Technologies’ first client to go public, though Viryl CEO Chad Brown says the Toronto-based startup has closed deals with seven clients so far. Its initial presses cost in the range of $180,000 to $190,000. Viryl’s pitch, fascinatingly enough, is music made the old-fashioned way—with help from modern-day technology, via digital controls. “Digital is pretty much better for everything except for listening to music,” Brown says. He projects that his company’s presses will manufacture three records in one minute, versus the traditional one per minute, but the proof will be once these presses see action.
Luckily for vinyl listeners, their format should also be getting an infusion of new presses from another, bigger player soon. Third Man, the label most loudly championing vinyl in recent years, told Pitchfork in November it planned to open a pressing plant at its new record store in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood, using equipment from Newbilt, a German startup building brand-new presses with, like Viryl’s, digital control systems. “The build-out for our Cass Corridor plant is almost complete and we’re expecting the presses to arrive and be running very shortly,” Third Man co-founder Ben Blackwell says now. Blackwell also sent along the below footage, of the first batch of Newbilt machines running in South America.
Digital controls will be commonplace on new presses, Blackwell says, but this won’t change the pressing process too much. “There’s not that much you need to re-engineer here,” he says. “Vinyl records produced in the ’50s, ’60s—they sound great. Rethinking every stop in the process is an unnecessary exercise. Sure, maybe you want to know the nozzle pressure at a certain point. But I think you can get there with a few precise, targeted upgrades. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
While a strong showing, these attempts are not the very first to try to meet vinyl’s current high demand via brand-new presses. In December 2014, San Francisco’s Pirates Press, along with the Czech-based GZ Media, announced that they’d implemented the first new vinyl-pressing machine in 30 years. Pirates Press owner Eric Mueller says they have nine new “double-headed” manual presses at the moment (the kind pictured in the photo below), and that they’re testing out new presses that will pump out records more efficiently. Meanwhile, another San Francisco plant—Second Line Vinyl—boasts of “bringing all-new, automated vinyl presses to the Bay Area this fall.”
Courtesy of Pirates Press
Though vinyl still makes up a small part of the overall music market, the question hanging over the vinyl boom since it made itself apparent has always been how much longer it can last. Viryl’s Brown says that when he started two years ago, he projected five years of growth. Two years later, he still projects another five years of growth. Beyond that, who knows?
In the meantime, any naive ambitions Brown might have harbored for “saving” vinyl’s supply issue while there’s still demand have been tempered by experience. “Reviving an industry, it’s not as simple as we originally thought,” he says. “We thought that we’d produce these presses and they would just sort of revive the industry. It turned out that a lot more needed to be done.”
Hand Drawn’s Blocker, for his part, said he’s just happy for a chance to shine a light on his regional North Texas music community. “One thing Chad Brown told us that I really glommed onto, right when we put the deposit down for the machine, was, ‘You guys now have the most advanced vinyl pressing facility in the world,’” Blocker recalls with a laugh. “We’ve never been first in the world at anything.”