ABOUT

Tangible Formats provides high quality lathe cut records for independent artists and labels in need of small quantities.  Your music is cut into blank virgin vinyl discs in real time.  The discs are specially formulated to resemble the durability, look, and sound of pressed vinyl.  You don’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity. 

SHOULD YOU GET LATHE CUTS OR PRESSED VINYL?

THE LATHE CUTTING PROCESS

Lathe Cut Records are ideal for extremely limited releases.  If you are looking for quantities from 1-50 then lathe cuts are the best option.  The process of lathe cutting a record is similar to vinyl mastering, except this step is repeated over and over to reach the desired amount of records.  If an audio project is 15 minutes long then each record will take at least 15 minutes to cut.  That’s not including preparation time.  The biggest factor in the price for lathe cuts is the time it takes to cut each record.   This is the service that Tangible Formats provides.  

THE PRESSING PROCESS

Tangible Formats does not press records.
Pressed Vinyl is ideal for anyone that can afford to manufacture them, has the room to store boxes of them, and can sell hundreds of them.  Our lathe cuts are done in real time so the cost begins to favor pressed records for orders over 100.  Pressing vinyl records is a three-step process.
  1. Mastering – the music is cut to a lacquer
  2. Plating – the cut lacquer goes through the galvanization process to make the metal stampers.   
  3. Pressing – vinyl pucks are pressed between the metal stampers into exact copies of the original lacquer.
The biggest factor in the price for pressing are the first two steps.   The cost of the materials and labor are expensive to do this.  This is why price doesn't fluctuate when ordering 1 or 100 pressed records.