Germany's Newbilt Machinery tackles the niche for vinyl record presses

Alsdorf, Germany — Newbilt Machinery GmbH & Co. KG is making record pressing machines — a throwback to an earlier age of vinyl that now is booming, thanks to growing demand from music lovers and musicians alike.

The machines, which include a compression molding machine fed by an extruder, are the first new commercial presses to make vinyl records in at least 30 years.

Detlef Seiffert and Erwin Neubauer, two German engineers who run the Newbilt factory, are something of a throwback themselves. They both worked at the former Warner Music plant serving Europe, just a few blocks away in Alsdorf, west of Cologne. Seiffert started at Warner all the way back in the mid-1970s, when vinyl ruled.

The third partner, Kees de Jonge, is a Dutch engineer who worked for a major European mold maker that became Axxicon Moulds Eindhoven BV, where he did an internal market study in 1985 on the prospects for CDs.

“I was gathering information from all over the place without using Google because there wasn't Google,” he said. De Jonge later became manager of the optical disc business at Netstal-Maschinen AG, the Swiss maker of injection molding presses.

CDs have come and gone since then, but vinyl is staging a major comeback. Newbilt has a high-visibility customer — Jack White's Third Man Records is installing eight Newbilt presses at the record label's store in Detroit. Visitors will be able to watch records getting pressed though a shop window.

These days, improbable as it may seem, vinyl records are suffering from success. The problem is a lack of production capacity.

All the old machines, with names like SMT, Hamilton, Lened and Toolex, have been scarfed up for spare parts, or refurbished, according to Seiffert.

Neubauer said there are 22 vinyl record pressing plants in the United States, and another 10 or 12 in Europe. Interest is high in Asia, where three album factories now turn out vinyl, according to Dan Hemperly, sales manager of Record Products of America in Hamden, Conn., Newbilt's U.S. business partner and a longtime supplier of equipment, parts and services to the recording industry.

The production bottleneck means that lead times to get a vinyl record pressed and on record store shelves is now about six months, Hemperly said. In Germany, Neubauer said, that can stretch out to 10 months.

With used equipment from the 1960s and 1970s in short supply, a steady stream of visitors is finding its way down the nondescript industrial drive to Newbilt.

Newbilt can build and deliver a record pressing machine in about three months, he said.

Newbilt machines are based on the old Finebilt presses, which were made until the early 1960s.

The Newbilt partners saw no need to reinvent the wheel, so they designed a reasonably priced, semi-automatic machine that uses a manual operator. The new machines have a Siemens Simatic controller, and have full guarding to meet all safety regulations.

Newbilt assembles the machines from components sourced from outside vendors.

“Newbilt is doing the engineering and the assembly. Everything else, we give out,” Neubauer said. “So, for example, we make the engineering for the screw, but we are not building it.”

According to Newbilt, setting up a complete vinyl record production line costs about 200,000 euros ($220,000).

On the Newbilt machines, an extruder turns out a hockey-puck sized piece of vinyl. The operator places the top and bottom label in the mold plates — known as the stampers — then positions the biscuit of material. The operator pushes two safety buttons, and the material shuttles away to an area isolated from the machine operator.

Steam heats the die and the stampers press together to squeeze vinyl into the grooves. Chilled water cools the mold back down. The operator removes the album and puts it in a separate trimming station, which removes excess flash.

Neubauer said these fairly basic machines are much more flexible than fully automated ones. You can easily change the molds to press standard 12-inch records, seven-inch 45s, heavier 180-gram vinyl platters, or colored vinyl. You can even get a marbled look by placing several small vinyl cakes of different colors into the stamper.

“We decided to build only semi-automatic machines,” Neubauer said. “Why? Because for one thing, people don't know how strong the market is growing. People still compare too much, with second-hand machines, price-wise. And a fully automatic machine would be too expensive, for doing the first steps now.”

Old fully automatic machines needed to be dedicated to a single type of album, so those presses can run large quantities, he said.

Hemperly, of Record Products of America, said a typical order at a record presser today might be 300 to 500, compared with 20,000 in the 1970s.

“The reason that we decided to clone the Finebilt and make a manual machine, we studied the market and found that everyone in the world was using the Finebilt to make their test pressings and to manufacture small production runs,” he said.

Still, Seiffert said that by the end of 2016 Newbilt should offer a fully automated machine. Some possibilities: Using a SCARA pick-and-place robot on a single machine. Or a Duplex model where one extruder feeds two presses, with a six-axis robot running between the two machines.

Record pressing is essentially compression molding of a precise, flat part. Hemperly compares it to baking bread.

“You can't use higher-temperature steam in order to heat more rapidly, because all you'll do is freeze stress into the vinyl material,” he said. “You have to heat it gently, and cool it gently, and take your time. If you try to make too many records a minute, you're going to have problems.”

Founded 70 years ago, Record Products of America originally made Hamilton-brand record presses, and later added automation systems. Eventually RPA stopped making record pressing machines and got into the optical disc technology business. But Hemperly said the company has continued to support vinyl record manufacturing, by finding and refurbishing old machines, sourcing parts and putting together systems.

“Today we are back to making machines to manufacture vinyl records,” Hemperly said.

The evolution of recorded music has been well documented: Wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. Then vinyl records to eight-tracks and cassette tapes, then to CDs in the early 1980s, on to digital downloads.

Vinyl never went away, but sales plummeted. In the United States, vinyl record sales averaged more than 500 million units per year in the mid and late 1970s. By 2007, they sunk below 2 million units.

But then came the comeback.

“Culture is changing,” Neubauer said. “What was yesterday ‘cool' is maybe tomorrow boring.” You can hold a record in your hand. Look at the cover art. Read the lyrics, printed out like poetry. Maybe pull out a poster. Vinyl can be art, in black, red and green.

Vinyl remains a relatively small player, but it is heating up. Remember when people replaced all their albums with CDs? Well, albums did continue to survive all those years, especially in some genres such as classical and jazz — where audiophiles appreciate what they say is the fuller, warmer sound of vinyl, and more underground music like punk and reggae. Bootlegs. “Scratching” and sampling of vinyl on turntables started in hip hop and has spread to other types of music.

You can't scratch a YouTube video.

Now, young hipsters are buying vinyl at independent record shops. Go into a T.J. Maxx, a Barnes & Noble, an Urban Outfitters … vinyl records! Older music lovers snap up landmark vinyl reissues by legends like Pink Floyd.

According to RIAA, sales of vinyl albums hit $416 million in 2015 — the highest level since 1988. And for the second year in a row, the amount of money generated from vinyl is higher than the revenues the recording industry receives from streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify.

Today vinyl accounts for just 6 percent of the overall retail music market in unit volume. Digital downloads account for the vast majority of purchased music. But vinyl fans argue that music off the “cloud” is ephemeral. Like Facebook friends you never actually meet.

Say you have hundreds or even thousands of MP3s. “You're not listening to music. You only have something in the background or in your ears,” Neubauer said. “And, they say that also younger people are coming back to sit down and listen, to a special experience. And this is coming back.”

While the numbers are relatively small compared to their heyday, vinyl record sales are growing, and CD sales are declining.

“I think the time is over for the CD. It was over and it is not just the copying. It is over,” Neubauer said. “It is not interesting anymore.”

The partners behind Newbilt Machinery have decades of experience in the recorded music industry. Seiffert joined Warner Music in 1975 and three years later became production manager at the high-volume Alsdorf factory that pumped out vinyl for the European market. He oversaw molding on 45 SMT and Toolex pressing machines.

After four or five years at Warner, he left to become an executive at an aluminum extrusion plant. Warner lured him back in 1984, to help set up a massive CD replication factory.

Neubauer joined Warner in 1986. It was a heady time, of a new technology capable of cranking out the polycarbonate CDs in massive numbers, and later DVDs.

“We produced for Warner Music worldwide, and we had order sizes of 1.5 to 2.5 million for one album,” he said.

Seiffert and Neubauer oversaw the installation of large numbers of KraussMaffei CD manufacturing machines, and other equipment. Warner's U.S. CD manufacturing favored Meiki presses, they said.

Kees de Jonge knew the pair when he was a vendor to the Warner Music plant while working at the mold maker, then at Netstal, and later as general manager of Optical Disc Corp.'s European division.

In 1991, the two German engineers left the Warner plant in Alsdorf (which is now Cinram GmbH), to founded a small company called Data Disc, and battled the big systems providers for the optical disc market. Data Disc grew, and it lasted about 10 years.

Then the two men spent another decade or so as consultants. In late 2013, they rejoined forces and worked to rebuild used machinery. Then Seiffert got a deal with a businessman in Singapore, who wanted then to him to rebuild a Finebilt record press.

After doing some research, they began to design a brand new machine. They founded Newbilt in November 2015.

Today Neubauer is Newbilt's managing director. Seiffert's title is partner. Kees, who joined the firm about two years ago, heads sales and marketing.

The engineers are used to friends saying they envy them for helping to rejuvenate vinyl album manufacturing. They're “cool.”

De Jonge relates one story: “A girlfriend of our daughter was having her birthday. I think she was 15. So her parents asked, ‘What would you like to have for your birthday?' And she said, ‘A record player.'”

Doesn't this make them feel good that albums are coming back?

“What makes me feel good is that we are building machines,” said Neubauer. He laughs. “We are not really ‘vinyl enthusiast' people. We are more machinery people. But I have to say that, on Christmas of last year, I put back my record player and played my Christmas albums.”