Lathe Cut Vinyl Records: Audio Comparisons and Reviews

That Little Elephant audio sample was f---ing horrible! A crazy change in the tone of the original recording.

Omg, for those prices the first and second records are scams
This does not make a good publicity to lathe cuts, when in fact they can sound like a pressed record if manufactured properly.
You can get lathe cuts made on neuman lathes for this price. Check out studios that also do mastering and lacquer cutting, usually they have proper equipment.

I also have use all three services.
Tangible was the worst in audio mono/stereo. They cut good deep groves, but it was 90% mono. Extremely disappointing. Did not have any printing done.

One Groove: Audio was the best! Nice deep cut, and in perfect stereo. I asked them to make the groove wider and they fit 24-minutes on one side. (After a second request). Low noise floor compared to the other two. Printing was as you said.

Little Elephant: Absolutely the best printing. I use them to print my jackets but not lathe the audio. Worst audio cut, shallow groove and soft audio in the groove. Which leads to much noise that can be heard in soft music sections. Also you can hear every time the gap is made by hearing the motor start to move the cutting arm. Stereo was good, but I was very unsatisfied with the cut.

Bottom line: Use One Groove for the cutting. Use Little Elephant for the printed jacket.

Wow, the little elephant result sounded dreadfull. No idea how you could give them 3 stars for that.

I'm getting a one-off record of my bands new album from Tangible Formats any day now. Pretty excited. What carrier do they use to ship records?

Thank you. Great information. Appreciated.

This is great! I have been looking into possibly getting a few personal recording cut to vinyl for fun. Love the review and comparisons. You just confirmed my thoughts about trying Tangible Formats.

Nice video! Thank you for the insight 🙏

I appreciate your honesty and the time and effort you put into this research, especially the very long turnaround times my competitors have. That is the reason I don't bother with jackets and labels it gets complicated and time consuming, since I have no experience in printing !

I'm thankful for this video, very informative. I have a new album I'm making and I'm trying to see which company I want to go with this time. So far, I've tried One Groove, and Little Elephant. One Groove was the first I tried back in 2019. I was actually able to communicate with the record cutter, but he didn't seem like he wanted to communicate too much, but he did reply to my messages. When I got my first records from them, the 12 inch jacket was just thick paper. It's ok, it looks fine with the poly sleeve, but it is flimsy and not solid. The record looked nice, but the label looked a little washed and small compared to a regular label. The thing I like best about them is that the music sounds pretty much like it does digitally. The stereo is full and it sounds great and loud. However, I ordered 5 records, and they forgot to space one of the tracks. But that's how I knew it was the first record they cut and that's the one I kept for myself.

Little Elephant on the other hand, awesome service like you said, very nice people. I ordered two records, one double LP and 20 copies of 7 inch records. The LP just didn't sound right, it had feedback on it, it sounds like a mic with slight feedback. The volume was very low, and overall, it just didn't sound that great. However, my 7 inch records sounded perfect. In other words, the quality of Little Elephant matched the music on my 4 song EP. It sounded like an old record from the 60s! I love it when vocals distort a little like they did with old records from the 60s. However, the volume was still low. But I really loved these little records, even the jacket is fine with me as long as I keep the poly sleeve on. So little Elephant is my go to for 7 inch records, they did a great job with mine, I fell in love with them and the stereo width was still there. They even fixed one of my tracks that had bass hard panned to the left.

Now I'm curious about tangible formats for my next record. I've been thinking about trying one groove again, because this album is one that I want to have great audio for. I'm not convinced with Tangible Formats yet. The one turn off I saw in your video is that they reduce the stereo width, but the quality was still there. Some of the panning on my album is very important, it's what makes the songs what they are. I just don't know who to go with now. I want the best looking record, and Tangible seems to look great. What do you think I should do? Sorry for all the writing, I got into it lol. Thanks for the video.

I tried little elephant.they had me send 3 different photos of my artwork so altogether i blew 60$ on pic development and shipping.they messed around too much and finally said there scanner broke and id have to send a PDFfile.i had no clue how.i finally figured it out.i never got my cd back from them and i never got my expensive photos back either.i emailed asking for them back but recieved no reply.

This is a very informational video, have you ever heard of the lathe cut record service called "intheclouds" records?