Sony's Tokyo Studio Ready to Revive Vinyl Record Production

TOKYO -- Sony will revive in-house production of vinyl records at a Japanese factory run by its subsidiary Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) as early as spring 2018, for the first time in 29 years. A Nikkei reporter on July 7 was allowed a glimpse of the fine craftsmanship required for vinyl record production at a Tokyo recording studio equipped with a record cutting machine to create vinyl masters, or original recordings for use in mass production.

Sony Music Studios Tokyo, one of Japan's foremost recording studios, is located in Minato Ward, Tokyo. A 10-sq.-meter room on the third basement level is home to a record cutting machine with a massive turntable.

The cutting machine produces metal stampers for production of vinyl records.

Controlled by audio data recorded in the studio, a stylus over the turntable started moving up and down to etch sound grooves into a lacquer disc. The stylus is made of ruby, rather than diamond.

The deep-blue lacquer is softer than conventional vinyl, making the technique of engraving fine grooves possible.

As I watched, the stylus cut grooves as the music played. A monitor on the wall showed a magnified view of the lines as they were tracked by a microscopic camera.

The width of the grooves represents the sound pitch and volume so that "I can kind of guess what type of song it is just from these lines," said Toshiya Horiuchi, a cutting engineer at the studio.

SME decided to install a cutting machine in 2015 when a surge in popularity of vinyl records started to develop in Europe and the U.S.

Although the company had until then outsourced the production to other manufacturers, it decided to create high-quality masters on its own by paying close attention to the sound production, said Shingo Miyata,a director at the studio.

SME officials searched for a secondhand cutting machine in the U.S. and took it apart to fit it into the Tokyo studio. A special foundation to reduce vibration was built for the new cutting room.