Is There a New Record Pressing Machine Out There?

@hometownhero Thanx! It is a Canadian company. The machine is quite basic. The old machines trimmed and spit out the records automatically onto a tall spindle. This one relies on a human at each transfer step. Good for humans, bad for speed.

@mijostyn Machines with manual transfer capability have a few strengths. Mainly when the operators have the ability to manipulate the molten puck special effects in the records can be produced, such is split, tri, quad color, splatter effects etc. 

Also the production waste to quality yields tend to be far better on a manual press as quality assurance is built in vs an automatic where defects would be caught at a later stage in production. 

Generally the downside is speed and worker fatigue.

On the other hand, the super quality Japanese pressings in the 80s were all done on manual press, so there's that.

Quality Record pressings in Salina, KS has had the ability to press discs without a lip all along. 

My Analog Productions subscription series of Prestige Mono and Stereo reissues are pressed with no lip, while my subscription series of the RCA Living Stereo are pressed with a lip. The folks at QRP once told me they also have contract pressing jobs that request/require no lip on the discs.

@dwette  I am certainly noticing more lipless records and I have to say that I prefer them. For those of us who cue manually they are much nicer. 

@mijostyn I think they look nice, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference for me. I don’t manually cue records and I also use an outer ring. It might be that the ring pulls lipless discs down better onto the platter, but I can’t tell for sure.