Presenting a custom record centering accessory, intended as a very quick and simple way of centering vinyl records with oversize center holes.
This compact and lightweight accessory is simply placed on the center spindle of your turntable over the record and twisted, positioning the sharp edge between the spindle and record hole, taking up any excessive clearance.
The Agnew Analog Reference Instrument Type 631 is a high performance direct drive motor, designed for professional disk mastering lathes and turntables. It is usually positioned on the floor under the lathe or turntable, driving the platter directly by means of a long driveshaft, similar to the drive system of the Neumann VMS-70 and several other professional disk mastering systems.
For many long years, J. I. Agnew has been examining, adjusting, repairing and replacing bearing systems of all kinds, from disk recording lathes and turntables to tape machines, high precision machine tools, measurement instruments, industrial equipment and all manners of motor vehicles, from passenger cars to heavy trucks. Over the past few years, he has designed and machined countless bearing units to replace worn or damaged units on a diverse range of disk recording lathes and machine tools. Valuable experience was gained, which along with his solid engineering background, was put to good use in improving his designs further and further, up until the current stage of development was reached.
The ultimate vacuum platter is finally here, and it is very reasonably priced. After three years of exhaustive research and development and several prototypes of different versions, along with field testing, we have finally arrived at what we believe is the most advanced and accurate vacuum platter ever made.
We recently had the pleasure of having Symatic over, from Bristol, UK, for a week of training on how to cut (and how not to cut) records.
Symatic runs Cut & Paste Records, a record label attracting some serious attention among skratchers, with high quality releases of skipless skratch samples, lock-groove tones, beats, and relevant music.
A customer recently imported a vintage Presto 75A disk recording lathe from the USA, with a view to cutting records in Europe.
He quickly discovered, like many people before him, that it was spinning a bit slower than it should, when operated from 50 Hz mains, via a simple step-down transformer. As with most vintage record cutting machines, the platter is powered by a synchronous AC motor, which "locks" to the line frequency.
This beauty is a fully restored and extensively modified, vintage Scully lathe, operated by Eric Conn at Independent Mastering, in Nashville, TN.
It started life in the 1940's as a completely manual machine. A sturdy design, capable of very decent results, these lathes were extensively used across the USA and other parts of the world for several decades. Many are still in operation today. In the original condition, they were quite limited in what they could do. But, as with most good lathes, they can take a lot of modification and improvement.
We are excited to announce that we have just finished assembling and testing the first prototype of the Agnew Analog Reference Instruments Type 710 Disk Recording Pre-Emphasis and Cutter Head Protection Module!
Meet George Vardis, a retired biologist with a Master's Degree in Food Technology, residing in Athens, Greece. George is a sophisticated man with many interests, including sailing, photography, motorbikes, and music. He plays the piano and the guitar, but his career always steered well clear of the music industry. He was never a recording artist, nor was he a recording engineer. In fact, he has probably never seen a recording studio in real life.
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, Sabine and 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
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?