Engineer Scott Hull knows how to make vinyl sound good. Brad Allen Williams sat down with him for aTapeOp interview. About the the difference between lacquer and DMM [direct metal mastering]:
Most of the records that we own were cut with a lacquer master. Lacquer is a paint type of material; it's put onto a disc and we etch the grooves into it using a sapphire stylus. It's somewhat soft — it has to be soft enough that we can cut it — but it's not really "wet." It's semi-hard. Direct metal mastering is the same types of grooves cut into a copper disc. As you can imagine, solid copper is a whole lot harder and more resistant to being cut than lacquer. The forces involved, and the tools involved, are different.
