Waxxy Poodle vinyl pressing plant revives record

Business and local economy reporter

Business and local economy reporter

From his home studio just outside of Middleton, Dave Eck of Lucky Mastering helps create the vinyl versions of albums by artists like Leon Bridges, Depeche Mode and Sarah McLachlan.

There, for 14 years, he has received each artists’ tape, fine-tuned the recording and transformed it into grooves on a lacquer disc. He sends that disc, called a “master,” to a plating facility that creates metal copies, called “stampers,” which stamp the recording into melted PVC.

Then, until recently, he and his clients would wait.

There are only around 40 vinyl-pressing plants in the U.S., the Associated Press reported last year. Those facilities have strained to keep up with surging demand over the last two decades, as young people have embraced the analog listening experience. U.S. record sales have risen for 17 straight years, and they’re up more than 20% in the first half of this year over the same time last year, the Guardian reported in July. Today’s biggest artists, from Taylor Swift to Boygenius, are increasingly releasing vinyl versions of their albums.

The album cover for the new Louise Post album, “Sleepwalker” rests on a stack of boxes at Waxxy Poodle record pressing plant.

That’s left many artists waiting a year or more for their recordings to become records, if they could even get on the list. “My customers’ turnaround was getting brutal, and the quality was going down,” said Eck, who started his mastering company on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, before moving home to the Madison area in 2009.

“A lot of pressing plants aren't taking new orders at all. You'll just get a phone that rings and rings, and you'll get a voicemail that's filled, and you won't be able to get a hold of anybody.”

But now, the wait is over. Last November, Eck and his wife Jennifer Jurgensen opened their own vinyl pressing plant, Waxxy Poodle. They believe it's the first in Wisconsin in nearly a century, since Paramount Records closed its Grafton factory in 1935. The new facility is part of a small but growing movement to increase the industry’s capacity by starting new, small presses.

A record press is pictured at Waxxy Poodle record pressing plant in Cross Plains.

Located at 1861 Ludden Drive in an industrial stretch of Cross Plains, it's a former insurance sales office surrounded by other (nonmusical) plastics manufacturers.

Outside, it’s hard to tell that the place is occupied, let alone that it houses one of the country’s couple dozen record-making operations.

Inside the cavernous space, just one machine makes the magic happen, melting bead-like vinyl pellets into fat, fist-sized “biscuits” and squishing them like a giant waffle maker between the stampers. Beside the machine sit bags of pellets for making different colored records: yellow, gold swirl, green. There are carts stacked with spools of finished records waiting to be labeled and slipped in their sleeves. And there are boxes of entangled spirals of colorful vinyl trimmed from the rough edges of the records, waiting to be recycled.

Meeting the need for speed

To date, Waxxy Poodle has pressed more than 100 titles, including albums by The Slackers, Link 80 and The Spits, as well as Green Bay punk rock band Boris The Sprinkler and Appleton rock duo 20 Watt Tombstone.

Dave Eck holds two different colored PVC “biscuits,” which are used to make records at Waxxy Poodle record pressing plant.

Where some plants have a year of backlog, Eck said Waxxy Poodle is turning out orders in four months or less, and as fast as two months when asked.

The company will take orders for as few as 100 records, but most are in the thousands, and eventually Eck would like to draw orders as big as 30,000. The labels and jackets that accompany the vinyl are printed by a third-party company, as are any CDs and cassette tapes. Records are labeled and packed on site by a team of assemblers that includes the couple’s daughters and Jurgensen’s mother.

A stack of “Remnants of the Vessel,” an album by metal band Faetooth, is finished and ready for packaging at Waxxy Poodle record pressing plant in Cross Plains.

But it’s not just about speed. Eck, who made his first music recordings on a four-track recorder on loan from the library of Malcolm Shabazz City High School and later bought the lacquer-cutting lathe used by legendary sound engineer Randy Kling to master hundreds of gold and platinum albums for artists like Elvis, The Supremes and Diana Ross, prides himself on the quality of the records Waxxy Poodle presses.

“The quality right now at the pressing plants is nothing like it used to be. I’ve had to re-cut records for some pressing plants three or four times before they can even get a product that isn’t damaged,” Eck said, pointing to pops, dings, skips and clicks as common issues.

A record press is pictured at Waxxy Poodle record pressing plant in Cross Plains.

“I seemingly have no problem … I send it to my plating facility, it comes back, I press it, it sounds amazing.”

Now the plant’s capacity is set to grow, with nine more pressing machines on the way. Meanwhile, Eck is working to increase the industry’s capacity beyond Wisconsin by helping people in Minnesota and Florida set up their own pressing plants.

“The demand just doesn't seem to end,” Eck said.

As the Cap Times’ business and local economy reporter, Natalie Yahr writes about challenges and opportunities facing workers, entrepreneurs and job seekers. Before moving to Madison in 2018, she lived in New Orleans, where she trained as a Spanish-English interpreter and helped adult students earn high school equivalencies. Support journalism like this by becoming a Cap Times member. To comment on this story, submit a letter to the editor.

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