When working Musicol, I had a chance to meet Scott who is in charge of cutting lacquers. This is an old method of vinyl mastering that uses a lathe to cut grooves into a lacquer disk. The lathe has a cutting head with two coils for the left and right channels. The coils move a heated stylus which cuts grooves into the lacquer coated plate. It is important that you create a few test grooves to make sure everything sounds okay before cutting grooves for an entire record. The cutting stage is also where the RPM is decided, which for our records today is usually 33 ¹/₃  or 45 RPM

Since lacquer is much softer than vinyl, it is more prone to scratching and must be handled with extra care. Each side is cut into a separate lacquer coated disk, and then sent off to one of our stamper manufacturers. At the stamper plant, lacquers go through the process of electroplating. This involves a nickel bath to transfer the metal onto the lacquer plate. The plate is then destroyed, and we are left with the “father” part which has inverted grooves. The father is then inverted again to make the “mother”, a metal copy of the original lacquer. The mother is then inspected and played back before being used to make the stampers themselves. Once the final stampers are created, they are sent back to us, polished, and used to press the grooves into the vinyl.