The Vinyl Pressing Glossary: Every Term a Plant Will Throw at You, in Plain English

You spent two years making this record. Then you email a pressing plant and get back a sentence containing the words lacquer, galvanics, ex-works and non-fill, and suddenly you're the one who feels like an amateur — despite being, you know, the person who actually made the music.

Here's the thing worth saying upfront: this vocabulary isn't a test. It's just an industrial process that's been running since the 1940s, accumulating jargon the way any old trade does. Plants aren't being obscure on purpose. They talk like this all day with people who talk like this all day, and it doesn't always occur to them that you don't.

So here's the whole vocabulary, in plain English, roughly in the order you'll meet it.

Before anything physical exists

Release. One album, EP or single, treated as one job: its own catalogue number, its own artwork, its own set of masters. The word gets slippery because it covers the music and the object at once, while a plant counts neither — to a plant the unit is a set of stampers for one pair of sides. A double album is still one release.

Title. The name a release goes out under, and the thing that separates two records made at the same time. Two titles ordered together are two jobs sharing a delivery, not one job with more discs in it. Worth being precise about early, because it decides how everything downstream gets counted, scheduled and quoted.

Master. The final audio you're pressing. Not a rough mix, not "basically done" — the finished thing.

Vinyl master / vinyl-ready master. A master specifically prepared for vinyl, which has physical limits digital doesn't: bass needs to sit centred rather than wide, sibilance ("sss" sounds) needs watching, and the louder you cut, the wider the groove and the less time fits on a side. A master that sounds great on streaming isn't automatically vinyl-ready — this is a real, common, fixable thing, not a judgement on your mixing.

Minutes per side. How long each side runs. It matters because it's a direct trade-off with volume: the more minutes you squeeze onto a side, the narrower the grooves have to be, and the quieter the record gets. Roughly 18 minutes a side on a 12" is comfortable; push past 22 and you're trading loudness for length whether you meant to or not.

Cutting. The step where your audio becomes a physical groove — a stylus literally cuts a spiral into a blank disc while your master plays. Yes, in real time. Yes, it's as satisfying to watch as you're imagining.

Lacquer. The blank the groove gets cut into — an aluminium disc coated in soft nitrocellulose. It's fragile, it degrades, and it has to move to the next step quickly. Also sometimes called an acetate, which is a slightly wrong name that stuck anyway.

DMM (Direct Metal Mastering). An alternative to cutting a lacquer: the groove goes straight into a copper-coated disc instead. Some mastering engineers prefer it, some prefer lacquer, and both camps hold their views with real conviction. Practical point: not every plant offers both, so if your engineer insists on one, that narrows your plant options before anything else does.

Turning one disc into thousands

Galvanics / plating / electroplating. The process of growing metal parts off your lacquer so the plant can actually press copies. It's electrochemistry, it happens in tanks, and you will never need to think about it beyond knowing it's expensive, one-time, and non-refundable once started.

Father, mother, stamper. The three generations of metal parts made during plating — genuinely what they're called, and yes, the naming is a bit much. What matters to you: the stamper is the final part that presses your records. Everything after this point is copies of copies of your original cut.

Test pressing (TP). A handful of records (usually 3–5, sometimes more) pressed from your finished stampers, before the full run. This is your checkpoint — the moment where a problem costs you a delay instead of costing you 300 unusable records. Take it seriously; we wrote a whole guide on what to actually check.

Sign-off / approval. Your written "yes, press the run." It matters that it's written, because from that point on, anything you approved is legally yours, not the plant's problem.

The physical record

Record (disc). One physical piece of vinyl. This is where intuition tends to break: a double album is one release made of two records, and to a plant that means two lacquers, two sets of stampers, two test pressings and two rounds of checking, against one sleeve and one artwork cycle. Which is why a 2LP costs well above a single LP and nowhere near double it.

Double LP (2LP). A release spread across two records, usually because the running time won’t fit on two sides at a level worth listening to. Nearly always the right call once a side pushes past twenty-odd minutes — but it changes the tooling, the packaging and the timeline in one move, so it’s a decision to make before anything is cut, not after a quiet test pressing lands.

140g / 180g. The weight of the disc. 180g is heavier and widely perceived as more premium; whether it audibly sounds better is one of those debates that has consumed more forum threads than it has settled. It usually costs surprisingly little extra, which is why it's such a common upgrade.

Solid colour. One colour through the whole disc, opaque or transparent. The cheapest step away from black and usually a modest per-copy uplift, sometimes with a one-off changeover fee for cleaning the press between colours. Which exact shades a plant can run is worth checking before you promise one in a pre-order announcement.

Splatter / marble. Two or more colours combined so the pattern falls differently on every copy. That variation is the effect, not a fault: nobody, including the plant, can make copy 40 match copy 12 or match the reference image you sent. Costs meaningfully more than solid colour and typically adds a week or two, because the press runs slower and takes more handling per copy.

Picture disc. A printed image sealed between two thin layers of clear vinyl. It looks striking and sells on sight, but the format puts the groove on a laminated surface rather than solid vinyl, so surface noise is higher and it is the wrong choice for a record meant to be played hard on a club system. Minimum quantities usually sit well above those for standard pressings.

Dead wax / run-out groove. The blank ring between the last track and the label. For decades cutting engineers have scratched messages in there — catalogue numbers, jokes, dedications, cryptic nonsense. It's the closest thing vinyl has to a hidden track, and most plants will etch a short line for you.

Matrix number. The identifying code in the dead wax that tells you which lacquer and stamper a copy came from. Collectors care about this intensely. You mostly won't, until one day you will.

Non-fill. A pressing defect where the vinyl didn't fully flow into the groove, leaving small rough patches that sound like distortion or crackle. One of the specific things you're listening for on a test pressing.

Warp. The disc isn't flat. Slight warping is common and often inaudible; bad warping makes the pitch wobble audibly and is a legitimate reason to reject a run.

Labels. The paper circles in the middle. Usually printed separately and applied during pressing — which is why "label artwork" is a distinct file from "sleeve artwork" and has its own template.

Inner sleeve. The paper or poly sleeve holding the record inside the jacket. Plain white is standard; printed inners cost extra and are one of the most common quiet differences between two quotes that both say "12" black."

Jacket / outer sleeve. The cardboard cover. Measured in gsm (grams per square metre) — 300gsm vs 320gsm board is a real difference in feel, and another thing two quotes can silently disagree on.

Gatefold. A jacket that opens like a book. Looks fantastic, costs meaningfully more, and needs its own artwork template with a spine measurement you'll want to get right the first time.

Print and artwork terms

CMYK. The four-ink colour system printing actually uses (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). Your screen shows RGB. Colours that glow on a screen can land noticeably duller in print, which is why plants ask for CMYK files rather than converting them for you and hoping.

Bleed. Extra artwork extending past the trim line, so that when the printer cuts slightly off-centre — and they always do, slightly — you don't get a white sliver along one edge.

300 dpi. Resolution high enough to print sharply. Anything sourced from a website is almost certainly 72 dpi and will look soft and disappointing at full sleeve size.

Spine width. How thick the sleeve's edge is, which depends on record weight and jacket type. Get it wrong and your text sits crooked around the fold. This is a genuinely fiddly measurement and one of the most common reasons artwork gets bounced back.

GPSR. Short for General Product Safety Regulation, the EU rule that has applied to consumer products since December 2024. For a record it comes down to one practical thing: the label releasing it counts as the manufacturer, so contact details have to be reachable from the sleeve and from your online listing. It isn't the plant's obligation and they usually won't mention it, which is why it tends to surface after the sleeves are printed. What actually has to go on the sleeve.

Commercial terms (the ones that cost money)

All-in. A quote meant to include every cost — setup, per-copy materials, sometimes freight — as one number. “All-in” is only as good as what the plant chose to put in it: always confirm freight and dead-wax are actually inside, not billed after.

Variant. The same title pressed more than one way — black and splatter of one record. Same masters, same artwork, same stampers, but two production runs, two label runs and two batches to check on arrival. Clients tend to count this as one order; plants, shops and stock systems count it as two.

SKU (stock keeping unit). One sellable item as your shop, your distributor and your stock count see it. A single title released as black, splatter and a bundle is one release and three SKUs. It matters more than it sounds: pre-orders, barcodes and shipping are all organised by SKU, not by release.

MOQ (minimum order quantity). The smallest run a plant will take. Varies more than you'd expect, and often depends on colour and format rather than being a single fixed number — more on that here.

Setup cost. The one-time cost of cutting and plating, identical whether you press 50 copies or 500. It's the reason per-copy price drops so sharply as run size grows.

Ex-works (EXW). The price at the factory gate, shipping not included. Deceptively important: an ex-works quote can look cheaper than a delivered one purely because a €150 freight line is sitting outside the number.

Over/under tolerance. Pressing runs aren't exact, so an order can legitimately arrive a little over or a little under, and you're invoiced for what actually turns up rather than what you ordered. The band varies by plant and is sometimes negotiable; some quote a percentage either way, some commit to the exact number. Get the figure written into the order confirmation rather than relying on what a sales email said, and don't promise the full run as pre-orders until you know it.

Lead time. How long from order to delivery. Varies with plant capacity, format and finish, and is the single number most likely to move after you've already told everyone your release date.

Deposit. Money upfront, covering the setup cost that becomes non-refundable the moment cutting starts. Structures vary a lot — we broke down the ranges here.

Repress. A second run of the same title, pressed from the stampers made for the first one. Cutting and plating are skipped, so a small repress fee replaces the full setup cost — but only while the plant still holds your stampers, which is typically a couple of years. Worth asking about before the first order, not after.

Now the honest part

You've just read maybe thirty terms. Here's what we actually think you should do with them: understand roughly six, and let the rest wash over you.

The ones genuinely worth carrying around are the ones that cost you money if you get them wrong — minutes per side, test pressing, MOQ, setup cost, ex-works, and over/under tolerance. Those six shape your budget and your expectations. The rest — galvanics, mothers and fathers, the eternal DMM debate — is genuinely interesting if you're the kind of person who enjoys knowing how things are made, and completely optional if you're not.

Because here's the thing: you didn't get into music to become fluent in electroplating vocabulary. Somewhere in the last few years there was a quiet expectation that independent artists should also be their own manufacturer, logistics coordinator, print technician and procurement department. That expectation is a bit ridiculous, and it costs people records — not because they couldn't learn it, but because learning it takes the time and attention that were supposed to go into the next release.

That's the actual job we do. We speak this language daily so that you can send us a message saying "12-inch, 300 copies, black, and I'd love a message in the dead wax," and get back a plain answer with one number and one date. If you want to understand every step, we'll happily walk you through it — a lot of our clients do get curious, and it's a genuinely fun process to understand. But you don't have to, and nothing about your record turns out worse if you don't.

Make the music. We'll handle the vocabulary.