Guenter Loibl has every right to be tired. The slick-haired, 48-year-old entrepreneur and music distributor has bounced back and forth between Los Angeles and his home in Tulln, Austria over the past few weeks, spending every waking moment preparing for production of a brand new medium he has dubbed HD Vinyl.
“I’m really quite exhausted at the moment,” Loibl chuckles through the phone at the start of our interview. “But anyway, that’s fine.”
As far as sources of stress, a touch of jet lag is probably low on Loibl’s list. He and his company, Rebeat Innovation, have recently secured $4.8 million in private funding after years of courting investors. In the next six months, Rebeat will take delivery of two $600,000 industrial lasers capable of searing miniscule grooves into specially designed ceramic discs. With them, Loibl hopes to simultaneously revolutionize the vinyl production process and take the fidelity of analog audio beyond its previous high water mark.
The phrase “HD Vinyl” is well shrink-wrapped marketing speak.
“We can put the grooves much tighter than it has been possible before. We can put 30 percent more information onto the disc — that can be more dynamics, more playing time, higher volume, or a combination of those three,” he says. “This is the part that you will immediately hear when listening to HD Vinyl.”
Loibl and his team have been putting in the long hours, but will they actually be able to deliver on such lofty promises? To begin to answer that question, you first need to know more about the technology behind HD Vinyl itself – and the hurdles it faces.
What the heck is HD Vinyl?
The phrase “HD Vinyl” is, to some extent, well shrink-wrapped marketing speak.
Unlike the physical differences between most evolutionary formats, such as the paradigm-shifting move from tape-wound cassettes to laser-etched CDs, the technology Rebeat is developing won’t actually change the size or material of the records that spin on your turntable. That’s because, at its core, HD Vinyl technology will simply combine two steps in the existing vinyl manufacturing process, aiming to improve upon the quality of the finished product.
But first, a quick lesson in current vinyl production.
At present, every record goes through a three-step process before it hits your local record shop or online shopping cart. To begin, a mastering engineer uses a specially designed lathe to cut music into a lacquer disc. That disc is then shipped to an electroplating facility where a chemical process will adhere metal (typically nickel) to the outside. This metallic “Father” disc will then be popped off of the lacquer, duplicated into numerous “Mother” discs, and shipped to a pressing plant, where each Mother disc will be repeatedly pressed into hot pucks of plastic to form the records you’ll spin on your turntable.
Nobody on the planet has ever manufactured a full-size vinyl disc using this new process.
Loibl thinks this process — particularly the physical lathing and electroplating steps — is antiquated, and he’s positioned Rebeat to change it. “Why are we using the same production process that we did 80 years ago?” he recalls asking himself when first dreaming up the HD Vinyl project. “Why don’t we use laser technology [to cut Mother discs]? This should be easily possible.”
In the HD Vinyl version of the pressing process, recorded music will be digitally mapped by a mastering engineer using software, then laser cut onto special ceramic discs.
Loibl claims that these ceramic discs will be more durable than the lacquers engineers typically cut, and therefore won’t need to be electroplated. Instead, they can be shipped straight to pressing plants and used to directly manufacture vinyl in presses, cutting the three-step process down to two.
In addition to cutting out electroplating (and the noxious chemicals that come with it), Loibl claims there will be audible benefits to records made with these laser cut ceramic “stampers.” With each groove being digitally mapped and recreated in perfect detail via laser, Loibl says, mastering engineers will be able to craft vinyl with increased dynamics and longer playback time.
Traditionally manufactured Mother discs must be changed throughout the pressing process to maintain sound quality, but Loibl says the ceramic discs won’t — meaning the first pressing will be identical to the last, which isn’t the case in the current production system.
HD Vinyl Claims
- Backward compatible with existing turntables
- Superior signal-to-noise ratio
- Higher frequency response
- 30% more playing time
- 30% more amplitude
- No stamper wear
- No toxic waste from electroplating
Because the original master doesn’t have to be duplicated into a Father disc — which then has to be duplicated into Mother discs — Loibl says no fidelity is lost between the mastering studio and the pressing plant. Loibl also claims that his process will be so superior to traditional production that the entire pressing industry will quickly shift towards it.
“We strongly believe that within five to seven years, 95 percent of the production of vinyl will be HD Vinyl,” he says.
That’s an extremely bold claim for as-yet unreleased and untested technology, but there’s at least some interest in the technology among industry insiders.
“I’m looking forward to hearing more about it,” Universal Music Enterprises’ head of Urban Music Adam Torres told Digital Trends in a recent interview. “Any kind of changes in the vinyl market that can bring better audio quality, people are always looking for.”
A long spinning road
Many of Rebeat’s promises — more streamlined production, higher fidelity, and longer playback — seem logical on paper. But there is one fairly significant hang-up: No one, including Loibl, has heard it.
Nobody on the planet has ever manufactured a full-size vinyl disc using a laser-cut ceramic stamper. As far as some mastering engineers are concerned, that alone is enough to put Loibl and Rebeat’s claims in question.
“That fact that you can do it [with a laser] does not mean that when it is played back on somebody’s stereo it’s going to sound the way you think it will,” says vinyl specialist Adam Gonsalves of Telegraph Audio Mastering, who has cut thousands of records for big-name artists like Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith, and was pitched the HD Vinyl idea by Loibl at a conference in Detroit last year.
“There have been people barking at this tree for almost forty years,” he adds, “[Loibl] is just the latest iteration.”
To at least some degree, he’s right; Loibl and Rebeat aren’t the first to attempt to bypass the electroplating step. In the ‘80s, famed German audio company and lathe manufacturer Neumann built lathes called the VMS-82 that could cut straight into copper discs — a process that the company called “direct metal mastering” or DMM.
There’s a reason you’ve likely never heard of DMM. Due to the shift to CDs, along with a lack of available copper blanks to cut into, the format quickly became nearly obsolete, with many VMS-82 lathes converted back to lacquer cutting devices. That said, there are a handful of DMM studios still active in the world, and direct-to-metal mastering never fully went extinct. So an analog process to bypass electroplating already exists, it just never made it to the mainstream.
“People don’t tend to gravitate towards high-res formats.”
Some see the fate of DMM as a dark prognosticator of what could happen to HD Vinyl if Rebeat can’t convince listeners it’s worth a premium price. After all, 48 percent of the records sold every year go unplayed, bought largely for aesthetic reasons rather than actual fidelity.
“People don’t tend to gravitate towards high-res formats,” says Josh Bonanti of Bonati Mastering (Mac Demarco, Slowdive, David Lynch), who was also pitched HD Vinyl by Loibl in Detroit. “180 gram DMM pressings and all that came out, and people were out there buying cassettes.”
Mastering engineers are also skeptical of the likelihood any such new methods will be able to vastly improve upon the already-impressive fidelity offered by traditionally pressed records without requiring a special stylus or cartridge to play it. As it stands, clean vinyl playing on a well-set up turntable through a high-end stylus, phono preamp, amplifier, and speakers delivers pristine sound quality that very closely matches what was recorded in the studio.
While grooves could theoretically be cut smaller or with different geometry to get higher fidelity out of them — and therefore require a special stylus to reproduce the sound — mainstream audiences may not go for it.
“What really matters is if you can cut something that will sound good when it is played back on a consumer system,” Gonsalves says. “When I was in grad school I was convinced everybody was going to buy DVD audio. Why wouldn’t you!? It turns out that if you need to buy a separate player, nobody’s going to do it.”
Real-world production
There are also physical limitations to how prolific HD Vinyl can become, especially at the onset.
Rebeat claims it will take about 12 hours to laser-cut each side of a record into its ceramic Mother disc. Experienced mastering engineers like Bonati and Gonsalves can cut both sides of a 12-inch record in about an hour and half on their lacquer lathes, charging about $150 to $200 per side. (Loibl wouldn’t talk specifics about the cost of pressing HD Vinyl because production was so far off, but the implication is that it will exceed that price — possibly by a wide margin.)
“What’s the price going to be? If the HD Vinyl thing quadruples the cutting charge, they wouldn’t even be able to go for it if they wanted to.”
Even with Rebeat’s planned two-laser setup running at full capacity, a single vinyl mastering engineer with a lathe can cut many more sides per year.
“We think we’ll be able to produce about 700 stampers in the first year,” says Loibl, “In the second year, when we accelerate the system, it will be definitely more.”
To put that in perspective, Record Store Day in 2018 alone produced 421 special releases, each of which required at least one set of stampers to produce. Needless to say, Rebeat alone is a long way off from being able to take over 95 percent of the pressing market, even if the HD Vinyl technology works exactly as Loibl claims it will, and the company follows through on its plan to open a third HD Vinyl production facility in Asia.
Due to the slower production speed, Bonati thinks the premium price HD Vinyl is likely to fetch could undercut any desire for the industry to embrace the technology.
“What’s the price going to be?” he asks, “I work with a lot of labels and bands that are self-financing all their stuff. If the HD Vinyl thing quadruples the cutting charge, they wouldn’t even be able to go for it if they wanted to.”
Wait and see
There are so many questions about whether or not HD Vinyl will work as promised that it’s really impossible to take anything other than a wait-and-see (or hear) approach.
“Use the Moonraker laser from James Bond, blast that stuff open,” says Gonsalves, “But how is it going to sound when it’s actually played back? Nobody knows.”
It’s really impossible to take anything other than a wait-and-hear approach.
Loibl and his team hope to produce the first ever completed HD Vinyl discs by the end of 2018, at which point mastering engineers and the public will be able to compare discs produced by laser-cut stampers and those made via the traditional method to truly evaluate Loibl’s claims.
For the Austrian innovator, those first days of testing can’t come soon enough. At this point, he’s confident that Rebeat’s technology will work, even if he hasn’t heard a spinning disc.
“We have just a small piece — 4×4 centimeters — where we created sine tones and saw tones [with a laser] just to find out under the microscope, ‘Can we really produce these micro-structures?’” Loibl says toward the end of our conversation, adding that the results were promising.
“When we have the first HD Vinyl pressing coming out of the pressing plant and we put it on the turntable, … it will be one of the most exciting moments of my entire life.”
As Loibl hung up the phone to catch up on lost sleep, we couldn’t help but wonder whether his excitement will translate on our turntables.
“Even if they’re able to just cut with lasers … and can have the stampers be of the same quality,” Gonsalves says, “Yeah, that would be a big deal.”
If all goes according to plan, we’ll find out soon enough.
