OK, I know vinyl records are in production for music both old and new and there are a nontrivial number of people who think vinyl sounds better than anything else (mainly compared to digital recording, but presumably also analog tape as well). But does anyone still press wax? Does anyone still insist upon wax?
Do you mean wax cylinders? I don’t think “records” were ever made from wax. Also, AFAIK, wax cylinder recordings were unique - they weren’t pressed, which is one reason they were replaced by a stamp-able medium.
Flat records were never made of wax. For a long time they used wax platters in the recording process - the recording needle cut a groove in hot wax, which was then metal-plated to make a master. Eventually they switched from wax to lacquer. Most 78 RPM records were pressed in shellac. They switched to vinyl after World War II (although they did use vinyl and other plastics before the end of the war - V Discs, which were sent to soldiers overseas, were made of plastic).
Wax cylinders were mass produced from molds. The wax would shrink upon cooling, which allowed the cylinders to be removed from the molds (without shrinkage the groove wouldn’t let the cylinder slip out of the mold).
Strange. I was convinced there were wax records in the time between cylinders and vinyl. Maybe I was thinking of shellac? Does anyone make shellac records these days?
Perhaps you are also thinking about so-called acetate records. (Unlike the Wikipedia cite, the ones I’ve seen in films seem thin and flexible. Maybe there’s another “soft” type out there.)
“It’s a Gas” was an acetate record bound into an edition of Mad magazine. I hope I still have mine somewhere.
There were flimsy records that came in cereal boxes back in the sixties. They were made of overhead projector sheet-like material, only black instead of clear. Sometimes you even had to tear out the round record along perforations in a square sheet. I know this because I saw them in my Grandpa’s record collection.
The site is a cause for sore eyes, but these folks still make wax cylinder recording blanks for the Edison hobbyist.
The el cheapo flimsy records found as magazine inserts and cereal boxes wouldn’t be mistaken for “wax” records by anyone. Nor are they “acetate” records in any use of the term.
I meant “soft” in the sense of wax-like, not floppy.