Watching "Earthly Pleasures" by Jill Fraser being Mastered

Not only has Jill Fraser finished her album, Earthly Pleasures, but she has signed a record deal with Drag City.  A record deal!  Could an international tour be far behind?  Drag City wanted to create a vinyl version of her work and so Jill went off to watch her album being inscribed on a lathe.  I tagged along because I have always wanted to see how they did this.

The comeback of vinyl as a distribution medium is one of two examples I know of where our society, or remnants of our society, pushes back against the forces of mediocrity and digitization.  The other example for those who care is the rebirth of large format film for art photography (e.g. 4x5, 8x10, etc).

The event took place at Golden Mastering in Newbury Park.  The mastering engineer and owner of the facility is JJ, and he is a second generation mastering engineer.  Their web page is www.goldenmastering.com.

In the following, the terminology I use is probably all wrong.  

The process as I understood it to be:

1. JJ listens to the music and evaluates whether any preprocessing is necessary to make it appropriate for the medium.  He explained what the types of problems are that he looks for but I dont remember too much about what he said.  I think it has to do with issues involving the high and low frequencies in combination that might knock the needle off the record when it is played back.  This could be all wrong.

2. He does some processing on those sections of the audio and reviews it with the artist to see if sounds acceptable.  Then a section of any problematic but now processed audio is engraved onto a test lacquer to see how it sounds.  This takes just a few minutes.  In our case it was done the first time but the process is fast enough that one could imagine being able to do this with many sections of an album iteratively until it was technically and aesthetically acceptable.  As far as I know, this processing is done digitally but one could imagine that in the past it was done in the analog domain.

3. The engineer runs through a check list to prepare the lathe and the blank lacquer for mastering.  Each side of an album gets its own blank lacquer and the lathe is checked again before each side.

4. In a few hours, the entire album, in this case 4 sides, is mastered and just needs to be packed up and sent to the next phase of the process where the various intermediates are created and a test pressing of the album is made.  This next part of the process apparently takes months and months depending on how busy the pressing plant is and where one stands in the hierarchy.

Some trivia: 1. The process of making the interpositive and internegative (not the terms they use) is very much a legacy electrochemical process and involves such techniques as electroplating the various intermediates.  2. No one makes this lathe anymore.  This particular one was refurbished by someone who had worked in this business decades ago and kept it in his garage.  3. The stylus that creates the grooves is an expendable and they are available on eBay and very expensive.  4. The whole process reminded me of the earlier days of visual effects where there would be one guy or a small team of machinists or optical printer operators or model makers.  A very small operation and generally not very social or glamourous.

Here is an article on disk-cutting lathes courtesy of Tom McMahon.

https://pspatialaudio.com/lathes.htm