The Long March...

Things are moving at a punk-rock clip in Compilation Land. The mastering session is booked for Thursday, and jacket and pressing situations are firmly in hand. This is an interesting process; while I've made dozens of CDs (comprising hundreds of thousands of units) and Wax Trax! had vinyl made of the early SMG singles and such-like, I've never directly caused the creation of a vinyl record. Since I imagine many of you are curious about this process, I will document it thoroughly throughout.

The first step is the mastering, of course, where they create the digital master used for the download version of the album, the vinyl master (which necessarily has different EQ), and cut the lacquers. These look like records, but are aluminum disks covered in lacquer, and the cutting lathe cuts grooves in them. The result is essentially a record, although not near as durable as a finished vinyl record. The mastering lab will give me one as a reference; these can only be played a few times before they start to wear out.

The lab sends another lacquer to the pressing plant, and they coat this disk with silver nitrate, and then a couple layers of copper, then some other janky metal, and then break out the laquer, resulting in a negative impression of the lacquer. This negative can be used to stamp vinyl records directly (usually only about 700 or so) but more often is used to make a "mother," which is a metal positive that can then be used to make as many stampers as needed by repeating the process above.

Once the pressing plant has the lacquers, they go in to a sit-and-wait situation, while they wait for the paper parts (the round labels and the jackets.) The jackets are being printed by Stumptown Printers in Portland, and the labels are being made by the pressing plant's printer. I'm waiting to pull the trigger on those until the mastering has been completed to everyone's satisfaction.

Regarding the mastering itself, if I was only doing vinyl, I would provide a CD-ROM with two audio files, side A and side B, with everything correctly spaced. Since I'm also getting a digital master for the downloads, I just give the engineer a CD-ROM with the files on it named appropriately (A1, A2, B1, etc...) and he will create the file necessary for the cutting process. These are all 48kHz 24-bit WAV files. Since this project will never be on CD Audio, we don't have to bother with the typical 44.1/16 scenario, and can work at the higher quality rate. If I was doing a jazz band or a classical project, I would record and mix at 96/32, in the interests of future-proofing, but since that would generally be pointless in this situation, and just a big pain in the ass besides, we're sticking with 48/24 for now.

So as you can see, this is a complicated dance that has to take place. I will say that other than the expense and the somewhat lower tolerance for error, it is really not all that different from having a CD pressed. I'm not going to attend the mastering session, since I know that mastering engineers find clients to be the Most Annoying Thing In The World, and would very much rather do their thing alone. If they wanted to hang out with musicians, they'd be normal engineers. I will try to snap a photo or two of the lathe and the mastering room when I drop off the files on Wednesday. We're using SAE here in Phoenix, as Chad suggested (and in these matters, Chad Clark's opinion carries some weight.)

EDIT: It was asked in private what the mastering cost; I don't see any particular reason to hide that information. Assuming that he gets it right the first time, and we don't ask for any changes, it will run right around US$1000.