van den Hul’s The Grail SE+ phono preamp and SAEC’s WE-4700 tonearm

The catastrophic February 6 fire at the factory where Apollo Masters produced LP-mastering lacquers—flat aluminum discs covered with nitrocellulose lacquer—will be old news by the time this column gets to you, but the repercussions of the loss will be ongoing for at least the next year and probably beyond.

Japanese firm MDC, the world’s only remaining lacquer manufacturer, is a small company that before the fire had been operating at capacity and turning down customers. Fortunately, prominent mastering engineers Kevin Gray and Bernie Grundman had switched to MDC well before the fire, and their supply of lacquers will continue undiminished. (In particular, Gray’s switch to MDC means that popular reissues like Blue Note’s Tone Poet series will continue unaffected by the loss.) The immediate losers will be smaller indie labels and mastering engineers tied to Apollo.

In the late 1980s or early 1990s, I visited the Linden, New Jersey, facility of lacquer manufacturer Transco, whose operation was bought out by Apollo Masters in 2007. When those Transco production lines moved to Apollo’s Banning, California, factory, I remember thinking, “What if there’s an earthquake? No more lacquers.” At the time of my Transco visit, not that many people cared about the dying vinyl industry. Even though the various lacquer formulations are highly flammable, both Transco and Apollo had been manufacturing for more than half a century without incident. What caused the conflagration is not yet known or has not yet been disclosed.

What’s certain is that when the current lacquer stash has been used up, all that will be left is direct metal mastering, which forgoes lacquers, and whatever MDC can produce for its existing customers. How this will affect vinyl’s growing popularity remains to be seen.