Short version: This is a fundraising letter. Click here to contribute and help keep the Lathe Trolls site running. You will be thanked on the "Our Sponsors" page. And THANK YOU for your prior contributions!! They are the reason the site has remained until now.
Now, the standard long-playing version:
Dear Reader.
I am writing this on June 24, 2025. 20 years ago to the day, in 2005, I launched a chat forum called The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls. I did so to get some technical questions answered. At the time, there was no reliable place on the internet to find out much of anything about record cutting or record production.
I knew nothing about making phonograph/gramophone/vinyl records... but I had always loved them. I had inherited a 1940's Wilcox Gay Recordio from a bandmate, and now I was trying to learn how to get better records out of it. I figured that if I created a chat forum, and promoted it on topic-adjacent chat forums, I might get my own problems solved.
Click here to read the first post.
At the end of 2005, we had 65 members. At our first year anniversary, we had 265 members. And twenty years later, here we are, soon approaching 6000 members who are either active or have passed through the site -- with the number of lurkers unknown. (To be humble about it: Over any recent calendar year, the members who actually log in number fewer than 1500.)
The original purpose of the site was to engage experimenters and vinyl artists. Over time, as technology and culture have changed, it expanded to also accommodate industry professionals -- while hopefully still supporting any and all other areas of interest in the making of phonograph records.
This year's Lathe Trolls fundraiser is named in honor of Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the first working phonograph in 1877, 148 years ago. He was 30 years old. I had held off on honoring him until we had a really good reason to celebrate. I think this year counts.
OK! Everything that follows is basically the fundraising letter I sent out last year. If moved, please help this site continue to survive and thrive.
Thank you. --S.E.
*******
You are a participant in the community that captures and preserves the sounds of today, in much the same way Edison devised in his "eureka" moment. We've just refined the process a bit.
As you know, The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls is the grassroots worldwide chat forum devoted to all aspects of record cutting and pressing, professional and experimental.
I'm calling on all visible active site members, as well as on quiet lurkers: If this site has enriched your life, please contribute now to our 20th anniversary fundraiser. It will allow me, the admin of the site, to continue to serve you behind the scenes, and to pay the site's service expenses. Details of what your contribution supports are further down the page.
The most urgent part of the message follows directly. The rest is what amounts to our annual report (which is much like last year's).
Can I count on your contribution? Last year we came close, but never quite reached our 16 2/3% participation goal. (I'd love to see 33 1/3% participation, frankly.). I'm starting out a little earlier this year, hoping to beat the odds.
Please contribute now to keep the Lathe Trolls site running.
Clicking this golden PayPal "Contribute" link, here, or as a button on any page of www.lathetrolls.com, will allow you to enter any amount you'd like to give (one time, or monthly), by card or Paypal. Or, use a PayPal app to send to lathetrolls@gmail.com. Please email or include a note to help me link/credit your username correctly on the "Our Sponsors" page. (The page will read "Doc Wurly." That's me: I repair Wurlitzer Electric Pianos from my Brooklyn apartment, while I'm not rewiring the site.)
All contributions fund our hosting and domain expenses, and support my labor keeping the site operational.
A contribution of $20 to $25 USD will make a big difference. Smaller amounts ($16.66 or $7.80, for example) will add up, as long as everyone pulls their weight. If your business income or most meaningful hobby depends on the site, please consider more: $33.33 USD is a magic number. For donations of $45 or more, you can customize your link, and also have it connect to a webpage outside the Lathe Trolls site. Banner ads are available for $78 on up--email me for details, or read this link. A checkmark at the Paypal page gives you the option of making a monthly contribution, too. (This is a great option if your cash flow is low and your allegiance is high). Your giving will keep this community, and this vital database of record-cutting knowledge, alive.
As you know, this one-of-a-kind site runs without major support. We don’t have fees: neither for membership, nor even, as of now, for the "Classifieds & Tip-offs" section listings. All we have are your friends and you: quirky brilliant individuals; proprietors of niche businesses; expert operators of mastering and pressing equipment; researchers; vinyl fanatics, and/or and/or professional and home tinkerers and inventors. You are the Lathe Trolls. You make the site worth visiting. I, with your help, and with the generous volunteer efforts of our moderators, keep it functioning.
This administration is generally performed and/or refereed by this one guy writing you: a freelance musician, Wurlitzer Electric Piano repairman, and audio editor living in Brooklyn. Ironically, I am not a professional record-cutter. I started this site as a record-cutting newbie; and to some degree, I have remained a newbie! Running the site takes diplomacy, triage, care, some tech skill, and both empathy and a thick skin.
The recent duration in review
We are five years post-Apollo-calypse. Our pro record-makers' world still wishes and hopes for another up-and-running source of lacquer blanks. The vinyl fad has managed not to end, has it? We all do our best navigating the world's terrors and uncertainties, and try to find stability and joy where we can.
Throughout this time, it is my hope that the community at Lathe Trolls has been a source of strength, support and enjoyable distraction. The site intends to continue for the foreseeable future-- as long as its members can chip in and support its operating expenses.
Good stuff you already know:
You are using the site, or you have enjoyed it at any point in the past two decades, as an enthusiastic sharer or lurker; as a giver or consumer of knowledge and equipment, related to the making of old-fashioned grooved records.
LatheTrolls.com enables the passing on of record-creating knowledge and experience that had been on the verge of being lost.[/list]
- It encourages innovation, while aiding in the salvage and repair of irreplaceable older equipment.
- It showcases vinyl art.
- It singularly promotes businesses in this reviving industry, offers problem-solving data and schematics for everything from old home units, to Neumann VMS-80s, to the new exciting record cutting and pressing solutions.
- It helps sellers and buyers of equipment--both common and unobtanium-- find each other.
- It is a unique, invaluable, deep, massive, sprawling database of the world's living knowledge of record-cutting and record-pressing.
- Its users volunteer, daily, to solve the most maddening of technical problems.
- It connects record-making professionals, living engineering legends, and hobbyists on every continent on the planet. And...
- It's fun!
- My work on the site, which is time-consuming. It is a labor of love, but it still needs funding to happen. I manually approve every new user; 850 users over the past two years, totalling 5950 members who ebb and flow in their activity. I also deal with forgotten passwords, requests to edit posts or update image links, and the occasional offstage or onstage drama. Maintaining additional manual backups of the whole site.
- I must keep the site software up-to-date to function with the latest server requirements. Every couple of years, I have to reprogram the site more-or-less from scratch, and migrate the old data to a new shell, just to keep it looking and operating the same with evolving server software upgrades.
- Domain and hosting related service expenses, including backup services, and advanced firewall services to block Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These expenses have crept up in recent years.
- Remember all those site outages in prior years? Swarms of bots caused the site to go down several times, and I've had to employ a cybersecurity service since then to block them. Through software maintenance and a gauntlet I ran through at that time, I've continued to do my best to keep ahead of such glitches this year, and to keep things running more smoothly. Knock wood, I hope this continues. All of this takes time, smart decision making, and a lot of effort.
I regret that since this is such a manual operation, I have not always followed through efficiently with the individual "Thank you" mail message that you deserve--even though, I am loudly thanking you over here when your contribution arrives.
What I DO do, though, is thank all sponsors and financial supporters of the site on the "Our Sponsors" page, accessible on a button at the top of the page. (Check it out!) At the time of new fundraisers, I archive older sponsorships, but they remain readable by links. Your support is memorialized permanently.
Contributions from January forward are included in the current "Thomas Alva Edison Fundraising Drive. (They have been updated as of June 22, 2025.)
Thanks for your ongoing support.
Yours in all peaceful revolutions,
Steve E.
Administrator
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls
PS. Please share this link (which contains a variation on this letter) on the social media of your choice. Spread the word!
https://www.lathetrolls.com/fundraiser
Read: More about Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph
Visit: Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, New Jersey
Contrary to evidence above, Thomas Edison's phonograph did not double as a water bong.