Behind the scenes at Nashville’s United Record Pressing, the oldest vinyl producer in North America

Demand for vinyl has been on the rise over the last 20 years, and it has skyrocketed over the course of the pandemic.

In fact, United Record Pressing, located in Nashville, is adding dozens of new pressing machines and two hundred new jobs over the coming year to keep up with consumers. The company is the oldest and largest record pressing company in North America, and it started right here in Music City in 1949.

“We think it’s a privilege to be in Nashville,” says CEO Mark Michaels. “Nashville is one of the ultimate music communities. You have a wonderful ecosystem that embraces vinyl. Why would you ever want to leave it?”

Michaels took me and This Is Nashville intern, Dereen Shirnekhi, on a tour of the United Record Pressing facility in South Nashville to learn exactly how vinyl gets made. 

The process starts in the cutting room. 

The star of the show is the cutting lathe. Think of it as basically a record player in reverse. A record player uses a needle to read the grooves on a disc as it spins around, and then that vibration comes out as sound. With a cutting lathe, sound from an audio file is fed into the machine. That causes its needle, which is actually a small ruby, to vibrate and carve grooves onto an aluminum disc. So instead of using a needle to read grooves in a disc and turn that into music, it takes music and carves it into a disc as grooves. 

That disc then goes through an electroplating process to create metal stamps. Then those stamps are used to press records.

Next up, we head into a big, hangar-like room full of hissing machines. 

Gallons of small PVC pellets are poured into hoppers, heated up using steam, and formed into soft, hockey-puck-sized lumps, also known as “biscuits.”

Then, it’s time for those metal stamps that were made earlier.  

“The record is pressed and the grooves are pressed into that hot biscuit,” explains Michaels. “The record then is brought forward into the trim pad there. It will spin around and trim off the excess vinyl, or what we call flash, so you have a perfectly round record with nice smooth edges.”  

Then, those perfectly round records pop out onto a tray to cool. 

Finally, the records are packaged, shrink wrapped and boxed up to be sent out to independent shops and major retailers across the country.