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Lacquer cutting studio Well Made Music upgrades with Merging Technologies

Well Made Music, based in Bristol, Virginia, was founded in 2010 by Clint Holley. Using its two fully restored Neumann VMS-70 disc cutting lathes, the studio has since cut upwards of 10,000 lacquer masters, with cuts pressed at dozens of vinyl pressing plants around the world from recordings by artists including Fleetwood Mac, the Notorious B.I.G., Billy Strings and Miles Davis.

In 2019, to complement the studio’s lacquer cutting services, Senior Mastering Engineer Dave Polster introduced digital mastering and restoration - a transformational move which led to the acquisition of a Merging Technologies Hapi unit and Pyramix Native Pro in 2021.

This allowed the team to extend its digital lacquer cutting services from a pure DSD/ultra-high resolution PCM source. Polster explains how the studio was first introduced to Merging Technologies’ kit: “Paul Blakemore is an early pioneer of DSD and multi-Grammy award-winning mastering engineer at Concord Music in Nashville. We’d heard him rave about his Merging Horus, referring to it as ‘the finest Digital-to-Analog conversion he has ever heard’. Having auditioned hundreds of different converters over his 30+ years in professional audio, we knew that if Paul endorses something - it must be incredible!”

Polster and Holley were duly invited to Blakemore’s studio to see his Merging rig in action. Polster later met with Merging representatives at the 2018 AES Conference in Virginia. Three years later, Well Made Music received its first Hapi unit and the equipment has been in daily use ever since.

With Pyramix Pro and Hapi, the team - Polster, Holley and Associate Cutting Engineers Michael Fanos and Harrison Hunt - can now feed material into its Neumann SAL 74B lathe cutting amplifiers, replicating the full resolution of the original source, with no signal degradation.

As well as its DSD playback ability, Merging’s Pyramix Pro and Hapi combination also allows Polster to send three discrete stereo outputs simultaneously to the cutting rig, conserving lacquer cutting space during quieter musical passages, thus optimizing groove spacing and depth.

Using a Cisco managed network switch and the Ravenna protocol for every cut, from PCM to DSD, Polster has integrated a second redundant cutting computer set-up, in the event of the main computer experiencing technical issues.

Polster and his team at Well Made Music also use Merging’s new Anubis Premium. “Anubis Premium could be the key that allows us to source higher-resolution recordings from all over the world”, confirms Polster.

(Photos: Dave Polster/Harrison Hunt/Billie Wheeler)

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www.wellmademusic.net

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