Back in 2015, we started a big lathe project, taking a beat-up Fairchild lathe from the 1930's, fitting it with an RCA cutter head, and eventually going full-on with a stereophonic feedback cutter head, vacuum clamp-down platter and automatically variable pitch.

The AM44 is a Neumann-based lathe, built on original Neumann castings, manufactured around 1944, during the second world war.

The project was founded by Flo Kaufmann, in Switzerland, when he managed to find a pile of these rare beds in the unexplored depth of a warehouse. The plan is to build them up into fully functional disk mastering systems, using newly designed and manufactured parts.

In 2016, J. I. Agnew acquired one of these beds, built up and further developed it, into an exceptional quality disk mastering system, which was put to professional service at Magnetic Fidelity.

John Delias, the guitar wizard of the popular rock group "Naxatras", filmed J. I. Agnew while cutting the master lacquer disks, from which the vinyl records of their debut LP were manufactured, at Magnetic Fidelity, and edited the footage to produce this short informative video, offering an insight into this seldom seen, mysterious process.

By J. I. Agnew
https://www.agnewanalog.com
https://www.magneticfidelity.com
PDF Version

The Mystery 

One might think that the whole issue of absolute polarity for a medium essentially invented around 130 years ago, would have been adequately discussed and standardised by now, leaving no room for further debates. Indeed, it has been, so why bother writing anything further on this topic?