Zenith Records’ Paul Rigby on what it’s really like to run a vinyl pressing plant

While the art of the vinyl record never really went away, it has enjoyed a vintage-fuelled renaissance of late – and Australia is leading the way in terms of providing the product to retailers across the globe.

As we head into the final days of entries being open for the inaugural Needle In The Hay competition – which is looking to award emerging artists with the opportunity to have their music released on vinyl – TMN spoke to Zenith Records director Paul Rigby about the technicaly challenges of operating Australia’s only dedicated vinyl printing press, when a band should think about a vinyl run, and why picture discs are a waste of money.

What inspired you to start up a pressing plant in the first place?

The opportunity arose to rekindle and resample the almost dormant Zenith plant in 2012. The previous owner had spread himself a little too thin with his involvement in a number of plants in Europe and the US as well as getting increasingly busy with consulting and the buying and selling of pressing equipment. The local operation suffered as the few staff were under-resourced and there was no drive or push to get the plant up to where it should have been.

Prior to this I had been involved in CD manufacture and broking as well as print and packaging. I had been brokering vinyl pressing from a plant in Europe as the Australasian agent, making margin on freight consolidation. The turnarounds were rather drawn out and solving problems with orders was rather fraught if the supplier had missed something or misprinted something. All the while I had been urging the previous owner of Zenith to consider the urgent need for a pressing plant in Australia, one which was committed to addressing the needs of the local market.

We entered into an arrangement late 2012, to move the plant and equipment from its previous location to a new premises, and to invest in setting up the new site to accommodate our needs. It took us around six months to get to a point where we could start making records.

How much of the system is automated – is manual labour still a big part of the record pressing process?

Very little of what we do is automated, so yes, it is rather labour intensive. We are operating four manual presses, but have two automatic pressing machines awaiting commissioning. The run sizes locally are typically quite small so the manual presses suit us fine.

We are doing increasingly more jobs for overseas – Asia, Canada and the US and these run sizes (especially in the US) are typically quite a bit larger. The automatic presses will ideally allow us to easily press larger quantities for these markets.

Are there a lot of challenges that come with running Zenith? What’s been the most unexpected hurdle?

We have three main areas of our operation: Lathe cutting, Plating and Pressing.

Murphy’s law often applies in that one of the three areas is having issues which renders the other two ineffectual. For instance, quite recently we started having issues intermittently with a cutterhead on our lathe, which meant one in every six or seven cuts had some issues that could only be detected after we’d made the plates and test pressed.

The plates were fantastic, clean, quiet and the pressing was fine, yet the issues we had in cutting hampered our output and meant that we needed to do quite a few re-cuts (which is the most expensive yet crucial part of the process). We were lucky to have access to a replacement butterhead in the UK to carry us over while we got our cutterhead looked at in Germany, but for a shipment that should have been a few days, dragged out to two weeks with anything and everything from customs to transit delays keeping the item stuck in transit.

Last year we upgraded our steam boiler and had two months of random issues with our presses – some days no problem, some weeks all good, then lots of rejects, cycle times all over the place. At that time the cutting and plating were spot on, yet if we’re struggling to make consistently quality records, then it’s by-the-by. 

As we’ve pretty much learned the process on the fly, armed with a fair amount of background and theoretical knowledge, nothing really prepared us for the reality of the things that went wrong. From intermittent issues with the galvanic and plating, to cracked moulds, steam leaks, run-ins with neighbours and developers, defective PVC material from our vinyl supplier, printed jackets that won’t dry and scuff in the autogluer. I could probably list 1,000 things we weren’t prepared for, yet had to find a way around and out of to get production back up and running. 

Only last week we had a power surge that took out our recently rebuilt lathe power supply, that essentially had to be rebuilt from scratch again. This meant we couldn’t cut for a week and when we can’t cut, we can’t make plates.

Luckily we had enough approvals to tide us over with pressing and getting jobs out, but it’s created quite a backlog, so the cutting and plating guys are working around the clock and on weekends to get on top of it.

What are you the most proud of?

There’s lots of things. I guess the first thing is that I’m proud to have assembled a group of people who have been as determined as I am to take what most people considered a basket case, into a serious manufacturing facility making first class records.

I’m proud that we can run a manufacturing business in an manufacturing-unfriendly economy, with no help from the government, and that we have eight full-time staff, gainfully employed who acquired a whole bunch of skills, who actually love coming to work.

I’m proud that we can stand by our product and say we make records as good as any in the world and that we continually develop new ways to improve how we do what we do.

How has the market and the industry changed since Zenith began? What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for the next 5-10 years?

It’s remained fairly static over this time as more customers are opting to press locally rather than offshore. When I took over, the plant was not responsive to the market and not what you’d all a service-orientated concern. There were lingering concerns about our capacity to deliver and produce quality pressings, which took some time to impress on a cynical marketplace that it was possible and that we were doing it – often in a fraction of the time, and cheaper than going offshore.

I think that more bands now are getting their music pressed on vinyl as a matter of course, rather than just a boutique line to compliment their CD release, with many artists and labels completely dispensing with releasing their music on CD, or limiting the CD runs for promo.

When we embarked on revamping Zenith in 2013, we figured the “vinyl revival” would peak in between three to five years and that sales may decline, they wouldn’t drop off completely. So in that respect, it would be a matter of downsizing to an extent.

Given that we don’t owe the banks anything or have massive repayments on capital equipment we’re pretty well-placed. We’re aware of two new pressing operations possibly opening in the next 12 months, and while we obviously hope that the market doesn’t get cannibalised, we see room for additional capacity in the market and “collegiate” like relationships between manufacturers like those that exist in Europe and the US where if one plant is struggling with as aspect of the operation, another plant can assist. It’s quite common for plants offshore to help each other with “over” work when a large order is delayed and extra capacity is needed.

What are some of the major albums Zenith has pressed? Which labels do you work with?

We work with everyone from the majors to indie labels to artists.

Our first major work was a re-issue of Albert Productions titles – Easybeats, Stevie Wright, The Angels and Rose Tattoo – back in 2014, which stand up to this day as sounding better than the original pressings. We’ve done quite a few reissues for Sony, John Farnham’s Whispering Jack, Men at Work’s Business as Usual, Something For Kate, Augie March.

We pressed the A.B. Original double album last year and repressed a special two colour vinyl Record Store Day limited release, which is now being hailed as an Australian hip hop classic.

We’ve pressed close to 1,700 titles in four years, so amongst those there are other many important titles that I’ve probably over looked or mean much more to the fans of certain artists than they necessarily do to me.

What kind of artists make up the bulk of your clientele? As the only Australian pressing plant to do everything in-house and as independently as possible, you would think that Zenith naturally draw a large deal of attention from DIY aficionados and alternative artists alike?

The majority of customers are independent artists and labels, but as mentioned we do a lot of work for the majors. We also do a lot of work for New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Chile. We regularly do rush orders for Canada and the US and at the moment running a number of 7” jobs for a new plant in Miami, who don’t have 7” capacity as of yet.

We also carry out cutting and plating, supplying metalwork to this plant as well, and the feedback on the quality of our cuts and plates has been really positive. This plant is the old Studio One pressing plant which was originally owned by Jamaican legends Coxone Dodd and Joe Gibbs. They have a relationship with the mothballed Tuff Gong Studio (Bob Marley’s plant in Kingston, Jamaica) and sent us original metalwork for early Wailers albums to make stampers from to assess the suitability of the old plates to go back into production.

At what point in an artist’s career should they consider putting their releases on vinyl?

As soon as they’ve recorded something. Don’t mess around, go straight to vinyl. A lot of bands will test the water with a 7” single, which restores meaning in the concept of a “single launch”.

A band can do a relatively short run of 7”s and make them available at a single launch and sell them for under $15. Limited pressings of 7” records can at some stage become worth good money for certain bands, so there’s always the mystique of an obscure 7” in years to come becoming a collectors item.

What are some of the stats on colour vinyl? Everybody loves the option but are they generally worth the costs associated with them? What about other gimmicks like etching, picture discs, messages in the runout grooves, irregular sizes etc?

Some of our customers are total purists and loathe coloured vinyl. Others may run a limited number in colour, while come of pour customers will run two or three different colours as their market tend to collector and completists and will buy all three colour versions when available. Coloured vinyl from back in the day can often sound quite poor because the old audio vinyl PVC manufacturers only made black vinyl and the plants would source a PVC compound, not designed for making records but sharing similar properties, melting points, extrudability as audio vinyl to make coloured records.

These days, any PVC compounder or manufacturer engaged in making audio grade PVC can easily run coloured compounds, so the sound of coloured vinyl records shouldn’t differ from black. From a cost perspective, coloured vinyl is more expensive and from our perspective, if a customer wants coloured vinyl, we charge a “washup” fee, which is running out and purging the black from the extruder so the colour is pure.

While we know how to make picture discs, we don’t offer them as they are expensive to make and there is a lot of waste. They also sound second-rate owing, once again, to the PVC sheets which the grooves are pressed into, not being formulated for audio or record pressing. 

Entries for the Needle In The Hay competition close on August 1, with a host of prizes for emerging musicians up for grabs. Head to the website to find out more and submit your entry.