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Disc Makers re-opens vinyl pressing plant
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 13 June 2014
One of the key downsides of the vinyl resurgence, people will often tell you, is that while demand for the format is growing, the number of places that produce it is not. This leads to long backlogs at the factories currently operating, and often lower quality than anyone would like.
Good news, though. US CD and DVD manufacturer Disc Makers has entered the vinyl pressing market. Or re-entered the market – launched as a vinyl manufacturer in 1946, the company got out of the vinyl game fifteen years ago when it ceased to make financial sense. But now it’s back.
“Vinyl got back onto our radar, as a new generation of enthusiasts got into it”, explains CEO Tony van Veen. “The market at first was small and hyper niche-y. Every year for the past five years, literally every year, we asked ourselves if it made sense to get back into vinyl. Finally last year, my team convinced me. We’re a full service provider of products to artists. It became an ever bigger hole in our range of services”.
The company has bought back the machines it sold all those years ago and refurbished its old factory to offer runs of as few as 200 records. Of course, this might mean that another vinyl pressing plant went out of business in order to get Disc Makers up and running again, but that would take the shine off the story a bit. Let’s just assume the presses were rusting in a shed or something.
“It’s not back to the future from our perspective; it’s forward to the past”, said van Veen. Though as he stood waiting for some sort of recognition for this comment, everyone just shuffled around and looked at their shoes, then someone changed the subject by making this overly dramatic video:
