Her lidt Vinyl Info fra Vintaeturntables - jeg high lightede noget af det jeg synes var interessant:
"Virgin" vinyl is manufactured from pure resin (an expensive petroleum
by-product) plus additives which are purpose-specific. In the case of
vinyl records the correct degrees of hardness/softness and density are
critical. Non-virgin ("recycled") vinyl is more often than not an
unspecified amount of vinyl plus the addition of other plastics, new and
second-hand.
(The sharp rise in petroleum prices in the mid- to
late-70's saw the
wholesale usage of less ACTUAL quantity of
vinyl-per-record as well as
more adulterated
vinyl-per-record.)
The addition of plastics to vinyl often has a
hardening effect
(which WILL accellerate wear) as well as creating bubbles
which tend to
be the pop-and-crackle hallmark of most US pressings from 1977
onwards.
A greyish color is a giveaway - look for a gleaming deep black
which
seems almost "oily" (as opposed to "polished plastic") to sight &
touch.
Also, cartridges and styli are manufactured to comply with vinyl -
not
hard plastics, and stylis wear and damage (from poor vinyl) could be
significant if your audio system is at the high end.
The whole concept of budget LP's was to sell them for much less and to
lower
the costs in manufacturing. In addition to using a lower quality
vinyl (or
in some cases, polystyrene)
, budget product often had fewer
tracks (10
instead of 12), and less money was generally spent on
graphics and liner
notes. In some cases, record companies negotiated
lower artist royalty rates
for budget and record club product.
Funny thing is that the one area
where "penny-pinching" tactics
generally weren't applied was in the
recording process. So for all of
those albums on exclusively budget labels
(like Tops, Crown, etc.),
while the pressings were generally awful, the
original master tapes are
wonderful. Some of these have been put out on CD
and they really sound
great.
Another interesting manufacturing
savings (though primarily with
singles) was the process I believe that
originated in the polystyrene
manufacturing of Golden Records by a gentleman
named Al Massler. I
think that Amy/Mala/Bell/DynoVoice and other
distributed labels of that
company used this pressing plant for their
singles. If you remember,
these singles did not have paper labels glued on.
The record
information was printed directly onto the vinyl. I'm guessing
this
saved at least a penny or two in the cost of manufacturing each '45.
Quality of injection mould pressings varied from pressing plant to
pressing plant but I believe nothing was ever as consistently good as
the commercial '45s pressed by Columbia's plants (though the DJ singles
of the 50's which were injection mould were infinitely better and lasted
much longer.)
While the Columbia Special Products division had
different grades of
vinyl available to clients, the vinyl compounds used by
Columbia and
Epic for frontline product was always the best quality.
Occasionally
they did use polystrene for Harmony 12" albums and while the
quality
wasn't as good as regular vinyl it was infinitely better than low
quality vinyl used by cheapo budget labels
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