Needles & Grooves

Well...vmp now has an official excuse to delay a pressing back a year now

The other lacquer plant won’t take on new customers either- per Analog Planet.

Are these copper discs inferior?

Cutting to copper (also called DMM or Direct Metal Mastering) generally sounds inferior to me. But it’s variable. I’ve heard really good DMM discs.

@Ponman2003 from what I'm reading, they're mostly just different. potentially more accurate, but less warm.

It seems likely the technology is not so much the issue as the attention paid during mastering.

In the jazz world DMM tend to be frowned upon. They are usually cheaper to buy, but personally I think they sound good for their lower price point. Comparing them to lacquer discs would likely make their 'inferior' sound more obvious though.

@Selaws I was doing a ilttle reading and it seems like DMM gets a bad rap in part because it emerged around the same time as digital recording and CD, and so ended up sharing a lot of their early SQ shortcomings, which have long since been addressed. I don't see any real reason a modern DMM master shouldn't sound great.

of course, Steve Hoffman disagrees, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@kvetcha if John Coltrane rose from the dead and performed a perfect rendition of 'A Love Supreme' someone on the Hoffman forum would still tell him he played it wrong.

DMM does generally sound great on rap LPs if that says anything, pretty decent on rock LPs too... if you showed me 2 different copies one DMM and one not i would not tell the difference probably (but that more depends on mastering).