Today on the show we sit down with Cash Carter, a musician who has been in the industry for years, to talk about how he became a part of the vinyl pressing company Kindercore Vinyl, and what it’s been like seeing the demand for vinyl skyrocket in the past few years. We discuss the history of vinyl pressing, how the world stopped producing new press machines after 1982, why vinyl’s newfound popularity triggered the design of new machines, and how that development has changed the industry. Cash shares fascinating insights about the vinyl production process and expands on how supply chain issues and the smallness of the industry have affected their business. To learn more about this fascinating industry and the worldwide vinyl phenomenon, make sure you tune in today!
Today on the show we sit down with Cash Carter, a musician who has been in the industry for years, to talk about how he became a part of the vinyl pressing company Kindercore Vinyl, and what it’s been like seeing the demand for vinyl skyrocket in the past few years. We discuss the history of vinyl pressing, how the world stopped producing new press machines after 1982, why vinyl’s newfound popularity triggered the design of new machines, and how that development has changed the industry. Cash shares fascinating insights about the vinyl production process and expands on how supply chain issues and the smallness of the industry have affected their business. To learn more about this fascinating industry and the worldwide vinyl phenomenon, make sure you tune in today!
EPISODE 9
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] MH: You’re listening to The Industrial Movement, where we discuss the people, the processes, and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The Industrial Movement podcast is produced every week for your enjoyment, and the show notes can be found at our website at www.theindustrialmovement.com.
Come back often and feel free to add this podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter @theindustrialmovement, or on our Facebook page. All links to our social media can be found in the show notes, and also at the bottom of our website.
Now, let’s get on to the show.
[EPISODE]
[00:00:40] MH: Hi, folks, welcome to The Industrial Movement. I’m Morty Hodge, and with me, as always, my trusty sidekick, Greg Smith.
[00:00:48] GS: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:50] MH: Today, we are so honored to have a very cool guest, Cash Carter with Kindercore Vinyl, based out of Athens, Georgia. Him and his team has been a customer of ours for a few years, and we’re so happy that he joined us today on The Industrial Movement. Cash, welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] CC: Thanks for having me, guys. I’m happy to be here. Yeah.
[00:01:08] MH: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about you, and what you do, and a little bit about Kindercore and then we’ll jump into it.
[00:01:14] CC: My name is Cash. I have been a musician most of my life. I think, started my first band when I was 14, 15. Doing that, you kind of have to find a way to make ends meet. Most musicians cannot make ends meet based off of their own music. First, I started labels, sort of record labels, then I started a record store and I just keep moving further and further back in the chain. I became a father pretty young at 24, and I’m 43 now, so they are 18. Just kept figuring out ways to make it work, to be able to be a father, pay the bills, support my family, and still stay in music and still be able to do the things I want to do and rock and roll.
That’s how I ended up here, Kindercore. I met my business partners, Ryan Lewis and Dan Geller. I’m originally from Jacksonville, Florida. I met them while I was touring with bands, and I came through here several times and met Ryan. We hit it off pretty well. He talked me into moving here. At the time, my day job, I was in IT and I could work from anywhere. Like when I tour, I would work from the tour van. So I can move anywhere, and I was trying to take sole custody of my kid and their mother did not want them to live in Jacksonville. Their mother didn’t live in Jacksonville at the time. Lived in New York and does not get along with her family. So she didn’t want my kid, Brighton to live near her family. Ryan have been trying to talk to me in moving to Athens for a while. It’s like, “I can just move to Athens.” He was like, “Let’s do something together.” I was like, “Okay.” “I have this idea for pressing plant for a while, so how about that?” I was like, “Okay.”
At the time, there were very few pressing plants in the world, maybe just a very few in that US. And there had not been new presses made since 1982, I think. So we were sourcing presses that were old presses. Being in the industry, the industry is a lot smaller than people think it is. I mean, it’s bigger now than it was when I was a kid because of the Internet, but you end up meeting everybody. And I met my friend Mike Dixon, he introduced me to Dietrich Schoenemann. Mike Dixon is one of the people to know in the industry, especially the manufacturing industry. He does lathe cut records. He does a record label called People In A Position To Know, also known as PIAPTK. Dietrich Shoenemann is our main cutting engineer. He does most lacquers and he’s another person that knows everybody in the industry. Through them, I had sourced some presses that we were going to get, they were old presses. Those presses ended up being in South Florida, their pressing plant called Sun Press.
But Dietrich was like, “Hey! If you wait for a couple of years,” this isn’t like 2015 or something like that, maybe 2014. He’s like, “If you wait for a couple years, we’re building new presses.” We were the first in line to get the new warm tone presses from Viryl. Though, we didn’t get the first ones because we didn’t want the first off of the assembly line, but we were the first in line to get them.
[00:04:12] GS: That’s awesome. By the way, Cash Carter is an awesome name. I feel like there’s a story behind that.
[00:04:18] CC: Usually, people assume it’s Johnny Cash and June Carter. And anybody in the music industry has been a server for at least a few years. When I was server and people asked me that, I didn’t want to explain the whole thing. So I was like, “Yeah, parents are huge fans.” But the reality is, my brother and I are the only ones in the entire extended family who ever got into any kind of music. My uncle looks exactly like James Garner, like exactly like James Garner when he was alive. My uncle is not with us anymore, but his name was Steve McCall. And there’s a little movie called Cash McCall with James Garner, and people started calling him cash because of the movie and I got named after him.
[00:04:57] GS: Well, that is a cool story. I like that.
[00:04:59] CC: Not the one people expect though.
[00:05:01] MH: Agreed. Tell us a little bit about Kindercore and some of the cool stuff you guys are doing. Just real quick off the website, it says, we press full seven-inch and 12-inch records and offer a wide variety or wide range of print and packaging options, including inserts, posters, jackets, inner sleeves, center labels. We consider ourselves a one stop shop for your project. Tell us about that. That sounds amazing.
[00:05:26] CC: Yeah. I mean, you know, I guess it didn’t explain correctly from the beginning. But we press vinyl, we press records, it’s something that we got into. We press the first record on Halloween in 2017. There are pressing plants who are full service that will get everything done. And there are pressing plants who will only press the records. Now, we don’t print the jackets, or the center labels or any of that here. We just press the records, but we can get all that done for people. Someone comes to us and literally, all they have is a reel of tape of music or files or whatever. And they want to get a record done that has a jacket, cool packaging, all that stuff and get it all done. Package it for them, shrink wrap it for them, do everything. We actually prefer to do everything. It’s easier that way. But yeah, I mean, vinyl is in an insane state of flux right now. We’re selling more records than ever in recorded history, including the 50s and 60s. It’s a crazy time to be in vinyl right now.
[00:06:22] MH: Yeah, yeah. I’ve read that. Let me ask you this. As far as the – is there a minimum order that you want customers to place?
[00:06:30] CC: Yes.
[00:06:30] MH: Okay. Yeah. What is that minimum order, if you don’t mind me asking?
[00:06:33] CC: It’s 100, and there’s a reason for that. There’s a lot of things that go into making a record. A lot of people don’t fully understand, starts off whether you have files – you have that files that are mastered specifically for vinyl, because there are – before, the last couple of years, I would say, you want to take it straight from tape. Because at that time, digital wasn’t good enough to really capture what vinyl should sound like. That’s kind of changed over the last couple of years, digital has gotten pretty good. But you do have to master it specifically for vinyl.
You need something mastered for vinyl, if it’s digital or tape. And that goes to a cutting engineer, and they cut onto lacquer. That lacquer is basically the first record, it’s a positive of a record. It’s a disc, it’s a metal disc that is coated in was basically same kind of almost the same formula as fingernail polish. The music gets cut directly into it. That gets sent to a plating facility, and stampers get made from that. That’s the negative. Those are what we get, and we put them on our presses. That’s what presses out a record. Now, all those parts are pretty expensive. That’s why the minimum is 100, and the reality is that, even at 100, you’re talking about 20 bucks a record at cost.
Even when you get just a 500, it gets down to four or five bucks a record at cost. We’re willing to do 100, but it’s pretty expensive. Anything less than 100, I tell people that they are probably better off going to a lathe cut shop, where there’s people out there who will actually lathe cut a record. When the lacquer gets cut, have a lacquer gets cut, you can actually cut a record, it’s not PVC like what we use for our records. It’s a different kind of compound. Usually, it’s on Plexiglas, and you can cut a record directly into it.
Now, they don’t last as long as press records, and they are not as – people would consider them audio file quality. But you can get records. But if you want less than 100, I would suggest that, because doing it this way is going to be very expensive. I mean, talking like 100 records, like black records with standard packaging is probably about $2,300. And for 500, it’s like $2,800. So you know.
[00:08:45] MH: Wow! So yeah, then that’s very common in most industries. The more you order, the cheaper it gets. Let me ask you this. You touched on this a little bit. What is the attraction to vinyl, especially now? Is it purely nostalgic or are there other reasons people should be listening to vinyl?
[00:09:02] CC: I mean, there is some nostalgia in there. I mean, that is definitely true. I would be lying if I were to say that that wasn’t true. Vinyl does have a reason why it sounds better. Reason being is the audio for vinyl doesn’t have to be compressed. That’s the big reason. For digital, it does. You have to compress it, and compressing audio means you’re basically squashing it, cutting off the high end and low end. And you don’t have to do that. It’s full range of audio, sound on vinyl. You don’t have to cut a high end or low end. I tell people all the time. Go listen to a good pressing of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I promise you, if you listen to it on CD your whole life, you will hear instruments you didn’t hear before, because they get cut off in the high end and low end.
But you know, the average listener to be completely honest is probably not going to be able to tell the difference. It comes down to, I talk to people about this all the time. There is some audio file, things that are true, most of it, it’s more of a lifestyle. It’s more of like someone claiming that it’s like gatekeeping, like. “I’m better. This is all better.” But a lot of it just has to do with nostalgia. But also, I think that people my age and older, we grew up with a music collection, whether it be CDs, or tapes, or records, or whatever. A lot of us are trying to recapture our youth, myself included. I think that’s part of it. The people who are my age and older are buying records. And then the people who are younger than me feel like I’m the last generation that had that. They didn’t – a lot of people, or people who work for me, they didn’t like, they grew up in the internet age, grew up in the age where you did not find your friends, or your tribe based off of what music you listened to. I think that they’re wanting that again, because they grew up in an age where everybody liked everything. You weren’t defined by your music tastes.
As they’re getting older, or the people coming up behind them, it’s like, for example, one of my favorite bands is pavement, right? You can say you like pavement, but you’re “not a real fan”, and I put that in quotes, unless you have at least a couple of their albums. I think that’s coming into play here. I think that during the pandemic, we went from – vinyl was on the rise too. It just exploded during the pandemic. I think a lot of that had to do with supporting bands. I mean, I’m in a band, I’m in a touring band and you can’t tour during the pandemic. I mean, some people have started doing it again, and so these people who go out and see these shows and have a disposable income, not spending money on tickets, so they’re buying records. I mean this in the nicest way, but collecting Vinyl is a disease.
You got to think about it this way. You buy a couple of records, you have like a cheap all in one $60 turntable, right? Records don’t sound that great on that. As entry level, we need those turntables out there. I’m not crapping on them. Then you go out and you buy a nice $250 turntable. Well, you bought this piece of equipment, now you’ve got to buy the parts to feed it, so you just keep buying more records. It’s like buying the records justifies owning the nicer turntable, then you get more records and you want an even nicer turntable. It’s this thing that just keeps going, going and going.
I say this as someone who, my collection has ballooned up to around 20,000 records, is now down to around 2,500. I want to keep my fiancé happy. It comes and goes, and I do think it is a bit of a disease, like a nice disease, and a disease that I hope more people get because it helps my business. But yeah, I mean, it just becomes this thing where it’s fun, and it becomes part of your identity, and you just keep wanting to feed it.
[00:12:36] GS: That’s awesome. You mentioned that the vinyl industry has exploded during COVID. I got a question, how many people do you have on your team? And I guess, two-part question. What’s the cycle to get an order through? How many can you press today?
[00:12:50] CC: We started the pandemic – we started last year – what was last year? I’m getting old. All the years went together. Last year is 2021. We started 2021 with seven or eight employees. We’re now over 40. So yeah, we used to press around 25,000, 30,000 records a month. We’re now pressing around 100,000 records a month. That was at the beginning of last year. We press 25,000, 30,000 records a month. We can do about 1,000 to 1,200 records, 12-inch records per machine on an eight-hour shift. Right now, we’re down a press, because as everyone has heard about the global supply chain, we can’t get in parts. But generally speaking, we have four presses, three of which are automatic, and we get about 1,200 records a shift and we do two shifts on those three presses. And we have one manual that is around 500 or 600, so a thousand a day. Let’s see, that’s 1,200 a day times three per shift. 1,200 times three is 3600 times two is 12. Around 12,000 records a day, something like that. That’s not right. Is it? No, around 6,000.
[00:13:56] MH: It’s about 8,000. Yes, 6,000 to 8,000, yeah. What are some of the challenges you face in the manufacturing side, the pressing said? What are some of the challenges that you face? You brought up the global supply chain, everybody’s struggling with that? What are some other challenges that you guys have?
[00:14:10] CC: As far as manufacturing goes, the process of getting records done and made is very, very complicated. I tell people all the time, as someone who I have a collector mentality, it’s probably why I got where I am. You collect figures, right PVC figures. Those have to look good, they have to look nice, every package well. But there’s an added dimension here. We have to have all that as well, but it also has to sound good. Some of the challenges are – the heat of the extruder, whenever it’s extruding the PVC. There’s three barrels in the dye zone. You change those one degree and temperature one way or the other, it’s going to change the way the record sounds. Then when it goes into the actual press, you have cycle time. While it’s pressing down, there’s steam running through molds that have the stampers on them. There’s a delay time and then there’s a chill time, where cold waters run through it. All that takes around 23 seconds, but there's a few seconds of heat, about a second of delay, and then 10 seconds of chill.
Even a half of a second, either way, any of those settings can change the way the record sounds. Dialing it in and trying to get a record sounding good, can be challenging. That changes depending on how hot it is outside or cold it is outside, the humidity outside, the humidity inside, the humidity when the actual PVC was originally granulated, all that can change how a record sounds. Dialing that in can be pretty challenging.
[00:15:29] MH: That’s incredible.
[00:15:30] CC: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t know that when I got into this. Even the center labels in the center of the record, people think they’re stuck on, they’re not. They’re pressed into the record. And depending on how you have to bake those labels, because if there’s any moisture in them at all, when they go into the press, even like moisture, you couldn’t detect with your bare hands, just feeling the labels. From the paper, to the ink or whatever, if there’s any moisture at all, it’ll will ruin the stampers. So you have to bake those labels. If you bake them too long, they could break apart and get into the record, even like little pieces of paper you can’t see, and that could change the way the record sounds. There are so many factors that can change the way a record sounds.
[00:16:08] GS: It sounds very scientific process. What kind of training? How do you learn about or get educated on how to do this?
[00:16:16] CC: When we first opened, me and my business partner, Ryan, we’re the two managing partners here. We also have a business manager now who’s our COO named Michael Greig Thomas. But started off with me and Ryan, and we actually ran the presses ourselves. We got trained by the company who built the presses, and we’ve trained the people that run our presses now. For the first two years, we ran them ourselves. That’s the problem with hiring people, we want to run 24 hours, because we’re so far behind on all projects because of the supply chain. But in order to run 24 hours, we haven’t trained someone up to run a press in the way that they need to run a press and be able to fix it because we’re not going to be here at four o’clock in the morning. That’s hard to do. It’s hard to get someone up to that level of competency.
[00:16:58] MH: How has technology changed your industry and your company?
[00:17:03] CC: We have new presses. I mean, they’re not new now. Now they’re five years old. But we have, they’re called warm tones. They’re from a company called Viryl. New presses are the biggest change in the industry, though they’re pretty much the same. There’s just automation to them now. And there’s automation before. The automation is much more complicated. The reality is, we have three automatic presses and one manual press. Almost all the problems we have for those presses is the automation. The manual press runs a lot smoother, but automatic ones run a lot faster. That’s changed, but that’s the only part of the process that has changed. That’s the only new part of the process. When we talk about having to get records lathe cut, the lacquers get cut before we can do anything, the lathes that cut those lacquers, those are still lathes, those are still Cold War Era machines that cut all the lacquers.
Most of the technology other than the presses is still really old technology, and no one’s updated it yet. Like for example, someone needs to come along and make a new facility that makes blank lacquers. There was only two places in the entire world that made blank lacquers. So every cutting engineer needs blank lacquers. It was MDC in Japan, there’s Apollo in California. Well, in, I think it was February 2020, Apollo made 89% of lacquers worldwide. MDC made 10% to 20%. Apollo burned down, so there’s only one place making blank lacquers, and it was the place that made 10% to 20% of the lacquers worldwide in 2020. Now, it makes 100% of the lacquers worldwide. And there’s no one coming up with a new facility to make blank lacquers.
Things like that, that need to be updated are not. They’re new cutting houses out there. There’s a brand-new plating facility. Well, they actually used to make stampers for CDs and DVDs, but now they’re starting to make stampers for records. They’re called Symcon. They’re out of Charleston. But like that’s a first new plating facility since we opened. There was a new plating facility that opened at the same time as us. But you would think with the explosion of vinyl, there’d be new lacquer, blank lacquer facilities, new plating facilities, left, right, new companies making new lades, but it’s not there. I mean like, when we talk about growing. the global capacity right now for making records is around, last I checked, it may have changed because it’s changing all the time. Last I checked was on 130 million records can be made a year. The demand is over 600 million records a year. That’s about where we are. That’s why I’m always late everywhere now because I’m trying to keep up with everything.
[00:19:39] MH: Well, you might have already answered this, but if you could have one thing piece of equipment automatically approved in next year’s budget, what would it be?
[00:19:46] CC: More presses. But I mean, here’s the thing, we could order a new press today and we can’t get it for a year and a half because they don’t have the parts to make the presses because of the global supply chain. We’ve got one press out there down, because where our stampers are going is cold a mold. The mold has, it’s a hollow piece of steel where the CD runs through it, to heat up the stampers, to press the record and then chill water to chill off the record, so you can pull up the stampers. We need those molds. Were down to mold. And we were on our backup molds, because we ordered new molds a long time ago, and they’ve been on backorder since August. Then the backup molds busted in November, so we’re down to press since November, that we can’t get it molds. I know, I can name at least five other pressing plants that are down at least one press. If not, there’s one pressing plant down four presses, because they can’t get in molds. There aren’t enough molds in the industry right now. We can’t get them.
We have four presses, one of which is down. There’s one that we change between seven inches and 12-inch. We can’t change it to 12-inch, so we can’t get caught up. That was how we get caught up on our 12-inch records. We’re really down a press and a half, because we can’t change that one out from between seven-inch to 12-inch. So yeah, I mean, I would love to get in more presses. But even if we were to order them today, we wouldn’t get them for at least a year and a half, possibly two years. We’re still trying to catch up for that year and a half, two years, and we can’t, and there’s really nothing we can do about it. Besides just tell our clients that, “Yeah, it’s late. Yeah, I got pushed back again for the fourth time. Yes, I know, you’re angry. I’m sorry. I get it. I know why you’re upset. There’s nothing we can do.
[00:21:19] GS: Maybe this would be bad timing for them. But if someone was out there and had a great idea of what a product they wanted to manufacture, what is [inaudible 00:21:25] to the manufacturing like you went through, what advice would you give them?
[00:21:29] CC: Do it? We need more pressing plants right now. I wouldn’t have said that at the beginning of pandemic. I would have said, “We’ve got all the present plans we need right now maybe get into thinking about ways to create new lades or whatever.” But right now, I’d say, “Right now is time to get into it. We can’t get enough presses on the ground right now. It’d be hard to get a press, but if you can get a press, start a pressing plant, please. We need you.”
[00:21:53] MH: Where do you see Kindercore in 10 years?
[00:21:55] CC: I mean, there are other pressing plans up there that are like – the two biggest pressing plants, I think in the world are GZ in the Czech Republic, and United in Nashville. I don’t want to be one of those plants. They have their purpose. They service who they service, mostly major labels. And generally speaking, major labels don’t really care what their record sound like. I mean, you know, I don’t mean that in a mean way. But you can go out and get like a major label record, depending on the artist. Some artists do care, but mostly, it’s going to sound like crap. Which is a bummer, because it gives a bad name to all vinyl, whenever major label stuff sounds like crap. I don’t really want to service the major labels. I want to service the medium sized labels, and the labels that I enjoy, the music I enjoy. I mean, I’ll press whatever, as long as it’s not hate speech. But I want to service the little guy. I mean, that’s who I’m interested in. That’s who I am. I grew up in a DIY scene, DIY ethos and that’s a part of music industry we want to take care of.
I think we’ll expand. We have more presses right now. I would not like to expand beyond eight to 10 presses. At that point, it becomes so unwieldy. We lose control of our quality control. I can’t be as stringent about our quality control as I can be now. That’s important to me that we are putting out good product. I mean, it’s vinyl, it’s not ever going to be perfect. That’s the whole point of the medium. But I do want it to sound as good as it possibly can. Also, something supporting to me is user experience, and I’ll be honest with you, right now, with the way things are, we’re I’m drinking out of a firehose, it’s next to impossible to give people a good user experience. But that’s what I’m concentrating on this year.
When you come to us to get a record, I want it to be as easy as possible for you. It’s not right now, I’ll be completely honest. If you’re coming to me to get a record made today, it’s going to be a little rocky, but that’s where I’m concentrating on fixing. Like everyone thinks about the pressing side and fixing all that, well, I feel like we’ve got our pressing down, we’ve got our QC down, we’ve got our packaging down. I really want to concentrate on user experience, client experience, things like that.
[00:24:01] MH: Over your time at Kindercore, what are some of the biggest lessons learned that you’ve taken away from your time?
[00:24:08] CC: There’s a lot. When you’re starting a business, you think that you have these hard and fast ideals, and these hard and fast rules. You try to stick to them, and as you go through business, you realize you have to be willing to break your own rules and your own ideals. You have to be willing – I mean, I’m not going to lose my ideals of wanting to be good to our clients and good to our employees. I think we’re the only pressing plant that starts at $15 an hour. But I think that’s true, that maybe there’s one over, but I think we’re the only pressing plant in the world that starts at $15 an hour. I’m not talking about those ideals. I’m talking about the idea of like, we’re only going to do this, right? We’re only going to do four presses. We don’t want more. We’re going to stay that way. We’re going to stay small. Well, we can’t say that small. If we were to stick to that idea, we can stay medium, but we can’t stay small. Or like having plans and being unwilling to bend on those plans or bend on those rules, I think you’ve locked yourself into not growing, into not evolving. I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned is like having my ideals, end up being flexible on them. I’ve learned to be flexible.
[00:25:14] GS: Well, you probably get to work with a lot of great bands and use the pressings for them. Do you got any cool stories of maybe some bands, people we like to hear?
[00:25:24] CC: Sure. I mean, our biggest and will forever be our biggest client ever was Paul McCartney. We did the McCartney III Reimagined. And unfortunately, it was during the pandemic, because we knew we were getting it before the pandemic, and there was talk of him coming here and filming some of it. But because of the pandemic, he wasn’t able to come. However, he did send us some champagne, whenever it was complete, which was very nice. I never talked to him personally, but I did talk to his manager. Excuse me, he doesn’t have a manager, he has a management team and they were very nice. They’re very nice, like couldn’t have hoped for any better of an experience.
I am of a certain ilk, and 43, grew up in the ’90s. I’m into the ’90s indie rock. My favorite label in the world is a label called Merge Records. I said when we opened this place, I wanted to press for them within the first five years. Started pressing with them in the first couple of months. I love working with them. They are one of the easiest clients in the world to work with. They’re super understanding. They’re wonderful people. I can’t say enough good things about that label. Some labels that I’ve worked with, and maybe less a fan of them. But Merge definitely made me a bigger fan of their label just by working with them. That’s kind of people we want to work with.
I’ve become friends with some of my rock idols, like Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth. I talk to him on the phone pretty regularly now, because we do work for him. Who else? I was talking to one of the guys of Pavement on the phone. We’re doing his solo album. Or excuse me, I was talking to his manager, stuff like that. I feel like when I talk to my old high school friends that I’m bragging, like name dropping or whatever, but I’m just excited about it. I’m still as excited about talking to musicians today as I was when I started my record store in the early 2000s. People tell me all the time that I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, and I agree with him.
[00:27:07] MH: That’s awesome. I saw on social media that R.E.M gave you guys a shout out recently.
[00:27:13] CC: That’s right. Yes, we repress their first seven-inch and Mike Mills – we’re in Athens, I kind of forget that those guys are famous, because we see him around all the time. But yeah, I mean, not all the time, but you know, you’ll see Stipe out, you’ll see Mike Mills out, whatever. But yeah, Mike Mills came up while we were pressing that importance of the PVC in the hopper. We’re also redoing the first seven-inch for Gang of Four. That’s another person I’ve become friends with and I never thought – I’m a drummer, and the drummer from Gang of Four, Hugo has become my friend from this place. Awesome human being. All the R.E.M guys are great. We used to have Cindy Wilson from the B52s practice in our warehouse.
[00:27:54] GS: Oh! I love the B52s.
[00:27:56] CC: Me too. She came to do the same thing with a seven-inch we did for her, when she came to record the PVC. So yeah, I mean, like 15-year-old me, I’d say it all the time, 15-year-old me would be freaking out with some of these people that I end up hanging out with.
[00:28:10] MH: That’s incredible. What is one common myth about your industry that you would want to debunk?
[00:28:16] CC: There’s going to be a lot of audio file people heard who are very angry with me., and they are arguing with me when I say this. But we offer regrind. What regrind is, is when you make a record, there’s extra PVC, when it gets squished on the edges of the records that gets cut off, you can grant that backup and reuse it. The audio file community would have people believe that. Regrind doesn’t sound as good. That’s not true. Well, if you let your regrind hit the floor and get dust on it, the dust is what makes it bad. The regrind itself doesn’t sound any different. I try to push people to do regrind. The only problem with regrind is you don’t get to choose the color. It’s random color or it’s black. But I would like to recycle as much as I can. We take care of our regrinds and it sounds just as good as, and I hate this term, “virgin vinyl.” The idea of virgin vinyl is just complete BS.
[00:29:08] MH: Interesting.
[00:29:08] CC: The other thing is, 180-gram vinyl does not sound better than standard white vinyl. There is no difference in sound quality at all. The same stampers are used, same lacquers are used. It’s just a tactile thing. It’s another audio file thing. I say this as someone who’s considered an audio file. There’s a lot of myths in the audio file community. 180 gram does not have an effect on the sound quality of the record. The only thing that affects is, it’s heavier. So it may not slide around the turntable as much. But once you’re at 140,150 gram, you’re not going to slide around the turntable anyway. Those are two of the biggest myths I can think of.
[00:29:42] GS: Just to talk about the equipment that you have, you’ve talked about the presses a lot. Is there any other equipment in your processes that we haven’t talked about that people would be interested to know what to use?
[00:29:51] CC: Yeah, I mean, we have shrink wrap machines that we use as well. We have the boiler, obviously, the chiller. We got an air compressor. We’ve got all those things in house that we have to keep up with and maintain. But the two main things that we physically use every day are the presses and the shrink wrap machines. We have an automatic shrink wrapper and a manual shrink wrapper. And yeah, I mean, we just got the automatic shrink wrapper recently, because we learn that there are stopgaps in different places. When we start pressing more records, we could get it through packaging quick enough, so we had to hire more QC people. We got through packaging quick enough. We couldn’t get through shrink wrap quick enough. so we had to get another automatic shrink wrapper.
[00:30:33] GS: Awesome.
[00:30:34] MH: Cash, thank you so much for your time. I know you’re busy. We want to let you get back to – you’re in the middle of a work day in a real working manufacturing facility. So we’re so grateful. If some of our guests want to reach out to you, maybe ask you some questions about the presses or just anything, how would they get in touch with you?
[00:30:51] CC: The best way is by email, it’s Cash, cash@kindercore.com. I will give people a heads up. I’m not as fast at email turnaround as I would like to be, because the emails are coming in faster than I can respond to them. So give me a day or two. If you email me for me to get back to you.
[00:31:11] MH: That’s awesome. Cash, thank you so much for your time today. It was a real honor to get to speak with you and learn a little bit more about the record industry and Kindercore.
[00:31:19] CC: Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys.
[00:31:20] MH: All right. Take care.
[00:31:21] GS: Very cool. Thank you.
[OUTRO]
[00:31:24] MH: Well, folks, that’s it for this week’s episode. Be sure to visit our website www.theindustrialmovement.com to view today’s show notes and get more golden nuggets of value that we have collected from manufacturing industrial professionals in our archived episodes.
On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter and find links to join The Industrial Movement community on Facebook. The Industrial Movement podcast is where we discuss the people, the process, and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. I’m your host Morty Hodge, wishing you great success.
[END]