WARNING: Don't deal w/ Poly-Cut.com

[mrrom92]

and by the way everybody just forget lathe cut in general. It sounds like garbage.

There is a company out of Germany offering home lathe set up's from about $2500 - $5000 (depending on the extras). These produce vinyl that sounds "okay". It's passable.

http://www.vinylrecorder.com/order.html

I've ordered a picture disc lathe cut from Corporate Records (Bklyn) and was astonished at just how terrible it sounded. Laughable! The absolute worst thing I've ever heard. It's so bad that it totally negates the effort put in by an infinite amount.

I had a lathe cut made for a friend's birthday with his music on it, went through corporate. I couldn't even comment on the sound quality, my turntable wouldn't even track it. My friend's turntable luckily is set up with one of those heavy stiff DJ carts that are designed to stay in the groove if nothing else, so it played for him. But I use a cart that's known for excellent and accurate tracking. Pretty much flawless on any pressed disc I've come across. So the fact that it couldn't handle this lathe cut came across as a major red flag. The grooves were waaayyy too shallow. There needs to be a way to adjust the depth even just a bit.

I'm sure it sounded decent as far as lathe cuts go, which is to say, generally not that great. Adam was generally pleasant to deal with, but I feel that the communication definitely could have been alot better - I was working on this project with another friend and she was not at all happy with how the project was handled as a whole. I had to talk her out of making him refund the entire thing, since he basically took forever to cut one record which did not come out all that great and pretty much did not keep us in the loop at all, but I felt bad because he did of course put labor and materials into this.

I generally care about quality and would not want to have my name attached to a lathe cut, ever. And aside from weird birthday presents and such, I don't think I'll be ordering any again.