Vinyl in the Sun: Inside the First Solar-Powered Record Pressing Plant in the U.S.
At the crossroads of an intense creative period and a personal tragedy, Dave Newell found himself stuck with an idea he couldn’t shake: What if he opened a record pressing plant?
This was back in 2021. Newell was grieving the death of his father, pondering what the next few decades of his own life might look like, and trying to figure out what to do with the tons of music he’d made over the past year. Since the early 2000s, Newell had traversed the rap underground, releasing music under the moniker Enoch with the Florida group CYNE. Fiercely independent, his desire to self-release a new solo record eventually dovetailed with an even bolder idea to manufacture it himself, too.
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“There were a variety of factors that all fell into place,” Newell tells Rolling Stone. “It just dawned on me that this might be the perfect thing for me to pursue.”
Three years later, Newell and his wife Betsy Bemis have realized that vision with Audiodrome Record Pressing, which officially opens today, April 22 (and you can check out Enoch’s album, which came out last month). It’s a boutique shop in Gainesville, Florida that aims to serve smaller artists and labels left in the lurch by the continued growth of vinyl, especially among pop stars whose massive manufacturing needs have created industry-wide backlogs. But it’s also a revolutionary kind of pressing plant: One powered completely by solar energy.
Newell and Bemis didn’t set out to start the first fully solar-powered plant in the U.S., but sustainability was always a key consideration. When Bemis first started looking into what it would take to open a plant, she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the heavy environmental impact of manufacturing vinyl. Vinyl itself is made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a plastic polymer, and often comes wrapped in single-use plastic shrink-wrap. On top of all that, there’s the heavy carbon footprint left by every stage of manufacturing and shipping.
“If we were going to do this, I needed us to do it in a way that we could feel good about, and mitigate as much as we could,” Bemis says.
Admittedly, solar power was not part of the initial plans to make Audiodrome eco-friendly. It was too expensive, maybe something Newell and Bemis could pursue down the line if all went well. But after a few potential plant locations fell through, the couple came across an available space in a new multi-purpose development called San Felasco Tech City that was powered by solar energy and boasted one of the largest arrays of bifacial solar panels in the world.
“They just had everything we needed,” Newell says. “It was kind of serendipitous.”
“I had always wanted solar,” Bemis adds, “so when we found this place that had the incredible electricity needs that pressing plants need, and was fully solar powered, we thought, ‘This was the place for us.’”
These solar panels will power Audiodrome’s two steamless record presses from Viryl Technologies. Typically, vinyl records are pressed with machines that use fossil fuel-burning boilers to create steam that melts and flattens PVC pellets into a disc. Steamless machines conjure the same heat to create the same effect but without a boiler. They do operate on a much “smaller scale,” Newell acknowledges, though that’s just fine for a shop the size of Audiodrome. (“If we had 20 presses, we wouldn’t have much of a choice — we’d have to run a boiler,” he adds. “That’s not a knock on anybody, that’s just how it works.”)
The steamless machines also feature a closed-loop chiller system that drastically cuts down on water waste, recycling the water needed to heat, then cool, the PVC into a disc. “The water bill we get is unbelievable,” Newell quips. “It’s like $10!”
Audiodrome has adopted other practices that are starting to become more standard across the vinyl manufacturing industry as it aims to embrace sustainability (Newell and Bemis both admire the eco-friendly efforts of the Dutch plant, Deepgroves). The excess trim cut from newly-pressed records is recycled to make more records, and anything that doesn’t pass quality control is similarly ground up and used again. Workers still have to wear nitrile gloves during the manufacturing process, but Bemis says they’re testing ones that are “biodegradable within five years, versus the typical 100.”
But Newell and Bemis are also putting forward some innovations of their own. They’ve commissioned two kinds of exterior packaging options they hope clients will embrace as an alternative to single-use plastics: One, made from paper, is curbside recyclable and biodegradable, while the other, partly made from cornstarch, is compostable.
“They’re not a one-for-one,” Bemis admits. “They’re not as transparent as poly bags and shrink-wrap, but the hope is that bands on tour [use them], or [artists] not on a major label, or in a big box store that’s requiring you to have it shrink-wrapped.”
“We have something that’s a little different than what people are used to,” Newell adds. “I don’t know if everybody in the industry is gonna use this tomorrow, but it could be a good baby step in the right direction.”
Audiodrome soft-launched in January and has been pressing records for a small group of clients since then. Newell has an array of contacts throughout independent music, especially hip-hop, while Bemis has tipped off some of her friends in the classical music world. But even before their official opening, word of mouth was getting around.
“One guy just called me out of the blue and he’d seen on our website that we were family owned,” Newell says. “He was like, ‘Man, that’s the coolest thing in the world. I want to press records with you because I just love that.’ That’s the kind of thing I hope we continue with.”
After years of hard work, Newell and Bemis are finally ready to hit the ground running with Audiodrome. The goal is for their two machines to press between 250,000 to 300,000 records a year, just during day shifts. If the demand is there, they’ll consider adding night shifts, but Newell says they want to “do things right” and “do it well.”
He adds: “I don’t want to take on a bunch of work just to make a buck. And I want the people that work with us to take pride in it.”
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