# The Groove: How a Vinyl Record Is Made, Pressed, Played and Collected

> A cited, independent field guide to the vinyl record: cutting the lacquer, plating and pressing, sizes and speeds, what the runout etchings mean, turntables and DJs, collecting and grading, what a record costs, and where records are made. With a runout decoder.

Independent cited field guide, 30,187 words, 200 sources, updated November 2026. Not affiliated with any label, plant, store or brand.

## Sections
- [A short history of the record](https://groove.cold.fyi/history/): This section follows the record from tinfoil cylinders in 1877 through shellac 78s to Columbia's vinyl LP in 1948 and RCA's 45 in 1949, which split the market into albums and singles. Cassettes and then CDs pushed vinyl to a rounding error by the mid-2000s. Since then US vinyl has grown 19 years in a row, passing $1 billion in revenue in 2025.
- [How a record is cut](https://groove.cold.fyi/cutting/): This section covers the first physical step in making a record. Every pressed record starts as a groove carved in real time by a heated stylus on a lathe, usually into a lacquer-coated aluminum disc, one side at a time. The cut obeys physics a streaming master never meets: bass has to stay centered, harsh "s" sounds have to be tamed, and every extra minute on a side costs level, bass or both. The machines are mostly decades old, with a couple of new ones arriving since 2023, and the playback curve that undoes the cutting EQ has been standard since 1954.
- [How a record is pressed](https://groove.cold.fyi/pressing/): A pressed record is a copy of a copy of a copy. The cut lacquer is silvered like a mirror, grown into nickel negatives and positives in a plating bath, and the last generation, the stamper, is mounted in a press that squeezes a warm lump of PVC on the order of 100 tons for something like half a minute. Many plants keep old presses running on salvaged parts, the compound and lacquer supply has hung on very few suppliers, and the 2020 fire at a California lacquer plant plus a demand surge produced waits of up to 10 months. By early 2025 typical backlogs were reported at about three months.
- [Sizes, speeds, weights and colors](https://groove.cold.fyi/formats/): A 12 inch at 33 1/3 rpm holds about 18 to 22 minutes a side by one plant's guidance, with longer sides possible depending on the music; spin the same disc at 45 and you trade minutes for a faster groove. A 180 gram record uses the same stampers and groove depth as a standard one of about 140 grams, and hi-fi makers disagree on whether the weight itself changes the sound. Colored, splatter and picture discs are made differently from black and can be noisier, and the new PET "eco" records come with maker claims nobody has yet tested independently.
- [The runout groove: what the etchings mean](https://groove.cold.fyi/runout/): The smooth band between the last song and the label is called the **dead wax** or runout, and it carries the record's paperwork: a matrix number for each side, cut numbers, stamper codes, plant marks and often the initials of the engineer who cut it. Read the right way, those scratches can tell you which factory pressed your copy and which lacquer it came from, but no single mark proves a first pressing on its own. And every so often there is a joke in there too.
- [How a turntable plays a record](https://groove.cold.fyi/playing/): A diamond the size of a grain of sand rides a wiggling groove, and a magnet and a coil turn that wiggle into a tiny signal that a phono preamp lifts and corrects. This section covers that chain, plus the settings and storage habits behind most skips, hiss, lopsided stereo and worn records. Two lab studies of record wear disagree about what happens to the groove, and both are given here.
- [Records and DJs](https://groove.cold.fyi/dj/): This section is about how DJs turned the record player into an instrument. A Japanese direct-drive turntable launched in 1972 became the club standard, scratching came out of the Bronx in the mid-1970s (the sources disagree on the year and on who was first), and since the early 2000s timecode vinyl has let DJs keep the feel of a record while playing digital files.
- [Collecting and grading records](https://groove.cold.fyi/collecting/): Collectors chase first pressings, but the codes in the dead wax only get you part of the way, and collectors themselves disagree on what counts as a "second pressing". Condition is graded on a shared ladder from Mint to Poor; in the US and on Discogs that is usually the Goldmine scale, in the UK the Record Collector scale. Discogs users added 114.2 million items to their collections in 2025, a company record, and Record Store Day has run every year since 2008.
- [What a record costs, and who gets paid](https://groove.cold.fyi/money/): This section is about the money in a record: what pressing costs, who gets paid from a sale, and how big the market is. Pressing costs a few dollars a record at 1,000 copies and $10 or more at 100, because setup costs land on every run whatever its size, and a $24 indie-store LP, in one label's breakdown, leaves about $3.19 each for the label and the artist. US vinyl revenue passed $1 billion in 2025 for the first time since 1983, per the RIAA.
- [Vinyl and the planet](https://groove.cold.fyi/planet/): This section is about what records are made of and what making them costs the environment. Most are pressed from **PVC** (polyvinyl chloride), a petroleum-based plastic, and one academic estimate, by Kyle Devine of the University of Oslo, finds the US recording industry used far less plastic in 2016 than at the vinyl peak of 1977, but produced more greenhouse gas, because storing and streaming digital files takes energy too. Makers are trying bio-based PVC, bioplastics and injection molding, and the gains they report are their own claims, not independent measurements.
- [Where records are made](https://groove.cold.fyi/world/): This section is about where the world's records are pressed. The biggest presser sits in a small town near Prague: GZ Media, which pressed more than 55 million records in 2021 and runs plants on two continents. North America went from about 15 plants in 2014 to a projected 43 in the US alone by 2022, while Japan still had at least one fully functioning plant in 2010 and Brazil had a second plant on the way in 2016.
- [Test yourself, and where to go next](https://groove.cold.fyi/next/): Questions drawn from every section, the full glossary, the best outside sources, and what this guide could not pin down. If you can source any of the open questions, the corrections desk wants to hear from you.

## Tools and data
- Runout decoder: https://groove.cold.fyi/decoder/ (data https://groove.cold.fyi/runout.json, 130 markings)
- Glossary: https://groove.cold.fyi/glossary/ (data https://groove.cold.fyi/glossary.json)
- https://groove.cold.fyi/sections.json, https://groove.cold.fyi/sources.json, https://groove.cold.fyi/timeline.json
- Everything on one page: https://groove.cold.fyi/all/

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