elasticStage: A brief review
Back in April I learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl production company that makes it easy for musicians to get their music on vinyl without any up-front costs. I ended up setting up Transitions and Refactor for manufacturing, and ordered some test copies.
My lead time at the time was around 6 weeks, and I was told the records would ship on May 14. They ended up shipping a couple days later than expected, but I still ended up receiving them today, which isn’t too much further after the original estimate.
Anyway, here’s my review of how the product turned out.
UPDATE: elasticStage have responded to my review by sending me updated copies. Definitely check out what’s new!
The albums come in a very nice, professional-quality slipcover, with a custom-printed dust sleeve. The print quality is fantastic, and it easily meets or exceeds what I’d expect from traditional vinyl manufacturing.
The records themselves are lathe-cut, and according to elasticStage the blanks are manufactured with a process which are much more environmentally-friendly than traditional vinyl although they do not specify what exactly it is (although some sources say it’s PET, the plastic used for drink bottles).
The labels on the records feel a little chintzy, though. The label for Transitions was slightly off-center (unfortunate, given the circle motif) and both of them very much have a feeling of being printed on an inkjet printer, with a finish akin to early-2000s CD label makers. The print quality isn’t quite as crisp as I’d like. It’s still quite good, though, it just doesn’t feel quite so professional there.
Sound quality is, of course, the really important thing here.
First off, I should mention that while Transitions was properly mastered to modern standards (-14dB LUFS integrated with a -1dB true peak and with EQ matched to a reference curve), Refactor just got a “make things sound properly loud and consistent” approach where I did it all by ear, and spec-wise Refactor’s LUFS are all over the place and with some tracks having a true peak approaching +2dB. So I was super curious how well they’d turn out.
Both of them came out pretty great! They’re not perfect by any means, but the equalization on Transitions matched my expectations. Refactor was a bit treble-heavy, and there were a couple of bits where the high peaks sounded like they might have been hard-limited a little. This was especially prominent on Little Bouncing Ball, and the mp3 version streamed via Plex to the same hifi setup didn’t have the same characteristics.
I would be super interested to know how much better Refactor could sound if I gave it a remastering pass, but as it is, the current vinyl version sounds quite good! It also does sound characteristically like vinyl, so I don’t hate it by any means.
The big downside is that both albums do exhibit a lot of surface noise, and that surface noise actually sounds a lot like some sort of digital noise floor issue, which makes me wonder about the signal chain in their lathe setup. I had cleaned both records and my stylus and it made no difference to the surface noise, so I can only guess that it’s probably due to how the lathe cutting works.
But anyway, Transitions still made my tears well up at the places it normally does, and something about the string arrangements just felt richer and more emotional to me. And the surface noise gave both records something of a vintage feeling to them, even though the noise itself didn’t sound like typical vinyl noise.
So, with all that said, I produced the vinyl to be a collectible artifact, and not to have better audio quality. Given that both albums were produced entirely digitally and are available in lossless formats from Mirlo and Bandcamp, if you’re looking for the ultimate audio quality, buy them in FLAC. Personally I just use the high-bitrate MP3 versions.
But as an artifact, an indication that I was here and that I left my little mark on the world, I absolutely love that this service exists, and if anyone else feels the same, I have no qualms about offering these albums for sale through elasticStage.
(But if you just want to listen to them digitally, that’s fine too!)
I recently polled on Mastodon about next records to produce. The overwhelming response I got is that people would prefer that I make CDs instead. Fortunately, elasticStage makes those too! So, expect that to be a thing in the not-too-distant future.
I’ll still probably put more albums out on vinyl as well.
One I really want to do is Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, but unfortunately that will have to wait until elasticStage supports multi-disc sets, as 63 minutes is a bit too long for an LP. They do have multi-disc on their roadmap, although they’re not expecting it to be available until next year at the earliest.