Andy Weber has always loved vinyl records.
(rock music plays)
- It allows you to slow down.
It allows you to sit back and listen
to a side for 30 minutes
and then sit back with your record jacket,
just like it's a fine book to read.
I'm Andy, glad to be here with you this morning.
Gonna be here for about another hour...
- [Jay] And as a Chicago DJ,
Andy's heard a lot of frustration in the local music scene
when it comes to releasing on vinyl.
- Yeah, friends in bands would would say they weren't going
to do vinyl because of costs,
and because of six month wait times.
- [Jay] So Andy and some friends
started their own record plant,
the first in Chicago in about 30 years.
It's called Smashed Plastic.
Andy's partner, John Lombardo, also owns a small label.
He says it amazes him that vinyl works at all.
- The whole process is kind of magical.
We always talk about the fact
that you can actually cut a groove
right into a piece of plastic.
And then you can have a turntable and an amplifier
do the opposite process,
where it's basically reading that groove,
pushing it through speakers,
amplifying it and creating sound waves.
Again, it's kind of a crazy process.
- [Jay] The process starts with PVC pellets.
Today, the pellets are white
and white records come out the other end.
They can also make traditional black vinyl
or just about any color.
The PVC pellets are melted in here
and our first formed into something
that looks nothing like a record.
- It looks like a hockey puck
and that's, what's getting transferred in.
- Wait, that thing is going to become a record?
- Right. Yeah.
- [Jay] The hockey puck and the record label
then move between two plates called stampers,
where it is flattened and the grooves are pressed into it,
kind of like a big waffle iron.
- So these are what are called stampers.
So this is the negative of the music.
So what happens is, when you saw the press,
when it was coming to close, these were on there
and they're closing together,
and where there's grooves, these are ridges.
So that's what's pressing out the music.
- [Jay] After the hockey puck is flattened,
it is quickly cooled, so it's not too floppy
when it moves to the trimmer,
where the excess vinyl is cut off, saved,
and made into more records.
It then moves on to a stack of finished disks.
(dramatic music)
One record every 32 seconds,
about 500 every day, just from this one machine.
And they're hoping to add two more machines soon.
One advantage of having a record plant in Chicago is
that local musicians or their labels
can pick up the finished records
and even listen to them with the people who made them.
This record is a collaboration
between Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist, Katinka Kleijn
and guitarist, Bill McKay, both serious vinyl lovers.
- [Katinka] It's less cold maybe. You know,
you just don't just press a button or something.
There's like this process that you see,
like, you know, when you make music,
you make sounds with physical things, with metal and wood,
and so it's nice to kind of get the feel
that sound is physical.
- [Jay] And by some magic,
when a record spins on a turntable
and a needle rides in the groove,
(upbeat music)
what comes out of the speakers is audio
that many audiophiles say is better, warmer,
and more real than any other way
to listen to recorded music.