Gold Records...made by plater?

[concretecowboy71]

I went to the Motown museum in Detroit today with my gal, and other than being blown away by the studio...great music made in a modded garage...I looked at a lot of the gold records on the wall. As I was looking at the matrix numbers and markings, I noticed the characters were backwards!

The later gold records had a company named stamped in the run out area and a picture of a griffin (1/2 bird, 1/2 lion).

Who makes the gold record and from what? I always assumed they were vinyl records sprayed gold. Shows what I know.

Anyway, I though it would be fun to know. I also assume there is little to no real gold involved either.

[mossboss]

Hey Concrete man
Simple What you seen was simply a negative which was flash gold plated mate
The master was allways vaulted the mother was allways out in the plating shop so as to produce stampers
If more stampers were required than the maximum of ten that was normal from a single mother at the time the master would come out of the vault so as to take another mother out of it
That allowed another ten stampers to be produced and so on so on
After 10 mothers from the first master another master would be produced from the master tape the whole process would be repeated qc etc
So what you have seen may have been any stamper used on the press or one that would not have gone on the press at all specifically made for display
You can tell by looking at it If it is perfectly flat it never pressed a record If it has the shape of a record than it would have been used
Both were used at the time
A platinum record was allways left as straight Nickel
Strange as it may seem the gold record that sold less copies was gold plated Platinum was left as it comes out of the bath
Keep in mind that a lot of plants had gold sputtering gear from days gone past so to flash gold a plate was no big deal at all and quite inexpensive
It may had half a gram of gold on it Not much at all
Cheers

[concretecowboy71]

That is very cool to know! Thanks.

[Aussie0zborn]

And don't be surprised if the matrix number on the gold record does not correspond to the record in any way.

[fenrir19]

But the gold and also platinum records are playable ?
Have they the high fedelity grooves ?

[opcode66]

Since it is a negative it would only be playable with a very special playback setup. You need a notched stylus, a turntable that rotates backwards and a tonearm mounted 90 degrees off of standard.