[Jukebox-list] Re: How to clean those records?/ Styrene

[Mechanical Music of S.F.]

David, not to land your balloon, but it wasn't just CBS labels (Columbia, Epic, etc.) doing styrene records.
The certainly were HUGE on them, though.  I do find some CBS/Columbia stuff out here (California) on vinyl from the 1968-1980 era fairly regularly.

The only large company in the USA post 1960s to manufacture it's own records was Capitol, and post 1970s, that wasn't the case, 100%.
Record manufacturing was farmed out to several plants nationwide, and you can often find titles in both styrene and vinyl.

On the west coast, I find the majority of Warner label (Warner Bros; Electra, Asylum, Reprise) 45 titles on styrene.
When I lived in Ohio (east of the Mississippi river), the exact opposite was true.
The above is also true with Capitol. 
This leads me to believe there was a major plant on this side of the country doing styrene. 
As for RCA, In Ohio, I found RCA stuff on both types of media.  My friend, Lisa, had an aunt who worked at a record pressing plant in Tennessee, and they did vinyl, and some on RCA.  She used to bring me new 45s once a year, yet much, at least half, of stuff I found on RCA in the 1980s in that area retail was styrene.
Small labels?  Casablanca, Boardwalk, RSO?  Ditto.  I have "Hot Stuff", "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", and "Stayin' Alive" on both vinyl and plastic.

I even have recently found, on Epic (a CBS/Columbia label) "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" [Charlie Daniels Band] and
"Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" [Michael Jackson] (both around 1979) on vinyl, so I know CBS was using a vinyl record plant for a while, at least for incredibly popular titles they needed to get printed fast, for a while.

None of it is cut and dried. 
>From this, I can only conclude that the labels sent out a master tape and left it up to the plants to master and press it; at least during the 1970s and 1980s. Most hit records, i can find 3 or 4 obviously different pressing of, with different media, and even different fonts on the labels. Give me a top 10 pop title from the late 1960s through the 1980s, and chances are I have both a styrene and a vinyl copy, or copies with different labels obviously from different plants.

Kyle ~ 
Mechanical Music of San Francisco
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Columbia was the big proponent of styrene records.  As far as I
know, nobody else produced them.  Are there new styrene records
appearing on the market?  That would surprise me as it was a
proprietary process used by only one manufacturer.  Radio
stations like the styrene 45s because for the first dozen
plays or so they were actually quieter than vinyl.  They could
copy the song off onto a cart and save the record as a "safety".
Of course, styrene's problem is its hardness, which causes
many sharp undulations in the groove to break off over time
and increase the distortion heard.
 
 
David Breneman         david_breneman at yahoo.com

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