Not for the reason that Vestax VRX-2000 has an off the shelf report reducing lathe felt like a real shift in who will get to make a report. Teenage Engineering’s new APC-2, constructed with Viennese analogue specialists SUPERSENSE, is the primary machine in additional than twenty years that appears able to choosing up the place Vestax left off, and it arrives with somewhat extra engineering behind it.
The context issues. Vinyl reducing has by no means actually recovered from the trade’s determination, someplace within the Eighties, that the format was completed. The lathes stopped being made. What survived have been Neumann VMS70 and VMS80 models, plus a scattering of Scully and Presto machines, all of them restored, re-restored and nursed alongside by a shrinking variety of engineers who perceive them. Teenage Engineering makes the purpose plainly: the pool of people that can keep these machines is drying up, and the reducing head stays the one hardest element to breed. That shortage is why a dubplate prices what it prices, and why reducing has stayed a closed store.
The APC-2 addresses that instantly. Somewhat than try a clear room clone of a Neumann head, Teenage Engineering has gone to Swiss inventor Flo Kaufmann, whose DIALBA stereo suggestions reducing heads have quietly constructed a fame in reducing circles for matching and in some circumstances bettering the originals. Kaufmann’s head sits on the centre of a system that features a direct drive motor on a precision polished tungsten shaft, variable pitch management, an built-in energy amplifier with suggestions and RIAA encoding, temperature managed heating for the stylus, a vacuum system dealing with each maintain down and swarf removing, and an RIAA monitoring amplifier with its personal customized tonearm for playback. Wow and flutter is quoted at underneath 0.01% WRMS towards a reference clock correct to 1.5 ppm.
The specification that may curiosity producers most is the automation. Pitch management could be pushed instantly from a DAW, which implies variable groove spacing, locked grooves and specialty cuts turn into programmable somewhat than a matter of a talented operator’s palms and ears. The entire machine could be managed remotely over Ethernet or wifi, and it runs from a single IEC connector. Anybody who has hung out in a reducing room, watching an engineer journey pitch by hand whereas the lacquer turns, will recognise how substantial that change is.
It isn’t a desktop unit. The APC-2 is powder coated aluminium on granite, 1300 x 600 x 400 mm, and Teenage Engineering lists it at 140kg, although early protection from MusicTech has cited 104kg, so the transport weight is value confirming earlier than anybody measures a doorway. Distribution is solely by means of SUPERSENSE, solely a restricted variety of machines have been constructed to date, and there’s no public value. You electronic mail them. That isn’t a comfortable launch tactic a lot as an acknowledgement {that a} machine like this must be positioned rigorously and supported correctly.
Teenage Engineering’s personal framing is that the lathe has traditionally functioned as a gatekeeper, and that reducing a report has meant securing entry, approval, a label and a price range. SUPERSENSE discuss small editions, data lower on demand, uncommon sizes and styles, and reside performances became a bodily object in the identical room, in the identical hour. Neither firm is claiming to compete with urgent crops, and they’re proper to not. Nothing right here adjustments the economics of a 500 unit run.
What it might change is the center floor. Underground digital music has at all times had a working relationship with the dubplate, from Jamaican sound system tradition by means of jungle, storage and the check press circuit that also sustains a great deal of the home and techno underground. That relationship has been mediated by a handful of reducing homes in London, Berlin and some different cities, with ready lists to match. If the APC-2 places credible reducing functionality into impartial studios, small labels and report outlets, the impact is much less about mass manufacturing and extra about turnaround, iteration and the power to listen to an thought on vinyl earlier than committing to it.
The caveats are the apparent ones. Reducing is a craft, and a properly specified machine doesn’t make an engineer. Lacquer provide stays fragile. And an unpriced, made to order product obtainable solely by electronic mail is a good distance from being off the shelf in any significant sense but.
Nonetheless, that is probably the most severe try at a contemporary manufacturing lathe in a era, from an organization that has kind in constructing issues no one requested for after which watching them turn into commonplace gear. The Vestax comparability is apt, however the VRX-2000 was a curiosity that arrived barely forward of the vinyl revival. The APC-2 arrives in the midst of one.
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