Main  Pressing plants  Pennyroyal Tea  Test pressings  Collection

Mastering-only facilities
As mentioned, vinyl records are often mastered at other locations, and by a different company than the pressing plant. The original matrix code is handwritten in the lacquer with a stylus, or stamped. The mastering facility will often leave their name in the matrix, along with catalog number and side A/B information, the signature or initals of the engineer, and maybe a more or less funny remark, as the famous Love Buzz etchings. This document is meant to analyze the matrices done by the different mastering facilities and to make sure the name of the mastering facility is not mistaken as the pressing plant.  Abbey Road Studios The UK records with machine written matrix codes consisting of the catalog number followed by A/B-1U-1-1, 1U-1-Q2, or similar, were mastered by Abbey Road Studios. They are often signed (handwritten) "Stu.", the signature of Stuart Hawkes, a mastering engineer. They do both direct metal mastering (DMM) and lacquer cutting. The machine written matrices are a bit faint, which suggest these masters are copper mothers mastered with DMM. When it comes to Nirvana, all records with these matrices were pressed by EMI. It's hard to say what these numbers mean. The first number after the side A/B information may be the number of cut, in other words it will say 2 if the first cut was unsuccessfull. Q1 or Q2 often appear last instead of the last 1. Q2 only appears when there are more than one cut used for processing and pressing. It may be an entirely different cut, or cut with a slave lathe (see The Mastering Lab below). If a release will get 7" jukebox promos, 7" silver injection label singles, and 7" black paper label singles, Q2 is used for jukebox promos and silver labels, while 1 for paper labels. When only pressing 7" jukebox promos and 7" silver labels, Q1 is used for both. 12" records (paper labels) always have a 1 at the end. (This is rather speculative, but it is consistent with the information I have available.) It seems Abbey Road also mastered for Orlake. The matrices do not have the 1-1-Q* parts, but some are signed "Stu", who is/ was an Abbey Road mastering engineer. All these cuts have deep, handwritten matrices. Maybe Orlake insisted on recieving lacquer masters. Orlake pressed all the Nirvana colored vinyl and picture discs in the UK.  Golden Mastering John Golden started his own mastering company in Ventura, CA in 1993, after working for K Disc. The records mastered by Golden Mastering, by John himself or his son who joined him in 1998, are identified by GOLDEN (handwritten or stamped) in the matrix code. These records include Hype 4x7", Bleach (2000 reissue), Earth - Capsular Extraction, and Sliver 7" fourth pressing, all on Sub Pop.  K Disc Mastering K Disc mastered most of Sub Pop's releases before they went out of business in January 1995. Easily identified by kdisc (handwritten or stamped) in the matrix code, often along with the signature of the mastering engineer, JG - John Golden, or ch - Carol Hibbs. Most Nirvana releases mastered by K Disc were pressed by Erika Records or Rainbo Records. If a lacquer has errors or they have to re-cut it for changes in the audio, re-mixes, or maybe re-sequenced, this is denoted in the matrix with "RE1", meaning "remake number 1". Further re-cuts will have RE2, RE3, etc in the matrix. Metal plates made from the old lacquers are discarded or destroyed. What is weird, is that they didn't wrote kdisc on any of the remakes I've seen. There is only one Nirvana release with RE1 in the matrix, the US Oh, The Guilt 7" single (also on the French 7", but that was made with plates duplicated from the US mother plates, so it's the same cut, read more here). The matrix codes for the US 7" is described on the Rainbo page. There are also two test pressings, Bleach (RE1), and Bleach side B (RE2), but these plates weren't used for pressing retail vinyl.  Masterdisk New York City-based mastering company, signed their matrix codes with MASTERDISK (stamped) or MASTERDISK N.Y.C. (handwritten). The signature Hw may be found in the matrices, this is the signature of Howie Weinberg, mastering engineer. Masterdisk mastered several American DGC vinyl promos and singles; Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come As You Are, the swirled blue Incesticide LP, and the Heart-Shaped Box 12" promo. Matrix codes for a set of lacquers cut by Masterdisk may be as this (Incesticide DGC-24504):  Side A: MASTERDISK N.Y.C. DGC 24504-A-GL-1  Side B: MASTERDISK N.Y.C. DGC 24504-B-GL1 First they mention who mastered it, then the catalog number followed by side A/B information, then followed by a pressing plant code for the pressing plant they sent the lacquers to. GL-1 means it's the first set of lacquers they sent to whichever plant GL is. They also mastered a lot for Specialty, these are coded SR-1 etc. Some have GL scratched over, this simply means they were sent to another pressing plant, and may have been scratched out by either Masterdisk or the new pressing plant.  SST, Schallplatten Schneid Technik Based in Frankfurt, Germany, this company mastered the white Unplugged in New York LP (GEF 24727). They only wrote the catalog number, side A/B, and signed SST.  The Mastering Lab Hollywood-based mastering company. The only known Nirvana record they cut is the American clear In Utero LP. They signed their lacquers with TML (stamped), followed with -M, -S, or -X. The letters refer to the lathe used for cutting. They would use two or three lathes in tandem, to make several lacquers at the same time. M is for the Scully master, S for the Scully slave, and X for the Neumann slave. Scully and Neumann are lathe manufacturers. A slave lathe means that it's controlled by the master lathe. so they are the "same cut", but there may be small differences depending on the lathe. Typically the S lacquer was the quietest pressing because it had a double belt insulated drive.  Utopia Utopia was (is?) an independent company which mastered for MPO. Their name only appears in the Sliver 12" matrix, but they probably mastered all the MPO pressed releases.
1. The label on the master tape for Sub Pop 100 Thanks to Sub Pop (image 1).

Main  Pressing plants  Pennyroyal Tea  Test pressings  Collection