As vinyl sales continue to soar, so do the lead times at pressing plants.

Part of the problem is the extremely limited stock of existing machines, but in recent months companies have begun to take the plunge and look towards developing a new generation of vinyl presses.

Following news of a vast new plant opening soon in Brazil, a Canadian company has announced its aim to develop a high-speed, fully automated machine that’s more efficient than any in the industry.

Viryl Technologies, which is backed by CAD$1 million from a local investor, plans to ship its presses worldwide for around US$160,000 each.

“The idea is to help the industry get rid of its own bottlenecks,” Chad Brown, Viryl’s chief executive officer, told the Globe and Mail.

“We’re going to collect all this dark information that’s never been known in record pressing before,” he says of the data-driven manufacturing process.

“Nozzle pressure, temperature, all this data that’s necessary to actually make a perfect record. In the fifties and sixties, they didn’t have this technology.”

The company’s first sale, to a Toronto buyer, is expected to complete within days, and the company says it has nearly a hundred sales leads.

The launch of Viryl comes after Jack White’s Third Man Records announced plans to open its own plant in Detroit, the city’s first new pressing plant since 1965. The plant’s eight brand new presses are built by German start-up Newbilt Machinery, but the company admits its design isn’t “anything new. We’re just making old manual pressing machines with new parts.”

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