[78-L] V-Disc - Vinyls/Shellacs (styrene)

[Royal Pemberton]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Milan P Milovanovic <
milanpmilovanovic4 at gmail.com> wrote:

> What exactly is styrene?
> Is it better or worse then vinyl in terms of noise amount or durability to
> wear?
> When it was announced in record industry?
> Are they using them nowadays in record production?
>
> Milan
>

Short for polystyrene.  It's that wretchedly brittle plastic they make tape
reels and CD jewel boxes from.  Lends itself to injection moulding, hence
its inplementation in pressing cheap records.  The earliest records pressed
of it I've ever seen dated from 1951.  Columbia in the US used it for 45s
from when they began producing them that year.

A mint styrene record played with the correct stylus can sound much the same
as a mint vinyl disc pressed from the same parts, but a styrene record will
wear more quickly, and become much noisier sooner.  Especially ill-suited to
records used in radio stations, as back-cuing ruined them very quickly.

I don't think styrene records are made by anyone now, and haven't been made
(AFAIK) since the end of the 1980s or the early 1990s.