On-demand vinyl manufacturing

[fluffy]

There's been a bunch of services that will do small runs of lathe-cut vinyl LPs but they're all ludicrously expensive and have terrible quality. Today I learned about elasticStage which claims to be much higher-quality for not much more than the cost of a run of pressed records, and apparently some people have liked their output.

I've set up two of my albums (Transitions and Refactor) with them and ordered what they're calling "test pressings" and I'll report back about how good they are. All-in, both records cost me $75 shipped from the UK, and they handle all the fulfillment and such for future orders as well. Right now they're claiming they'll ship within 6 weeks, but hopefully it'll come sooner than that.

It'd be really cool if this is a workable service, because I have just enough fans who want my stuff on vinyl that I want this to be a thing but not enough fans to justify doing an actual pressing run just yet.

(Technically these are PET, not PVC, so not technically "vinyl" per se, but they're 12" LP records, which is the important thing.)

Right now they only support single discs with a maximum duration of 45 minutes (22:30 per side) but they're planning multi-disc as an option down the road. Hopefully I'll be able to put Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To on vinyl at some point too!

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Sounds promising. I'm looking forward to hearing your review.

[fluffy]

Me too! It seems they're pretty popular and behind on manufacturing right now but their whole business model is to be able to scale up to meet demand (that's even in their name, "elastic") but it's also apparently pretty new and suddenly getting a lot of attention. For example, this Reddit thread is only from four months ago, and one comment from someone who used it indicates that their lead time was about a week and a half although it isn't clear when that lead time was from.

Oh they also will do short-run fulfillment in boxes of 25 or 50 at a pretty decent discount, as well, so it's still useful for stocking up before a show or marketing push or whatever. Their per-disc price isn't quite as good as a pressed run of 100 but it's still pretty darn good.

So yeah I'm excited about finally having my music on vinyl! Even if I only end up with a couple of shitty test pressings.

[fluffy]

Anyway I finally got my records today, and I wrote a bit about it on my blog: https://sockpuppet.band/blog/2920-elast ... ief-review

tl;dr: The quality is good for what it is. Real vinyl manufacturing will produce better results, but if all you want is a collectible artifact, elasticStage is totally fine.