High
Fidelity Review Feature:
Visiting The Crest National
Hybrid SACD Production Line
A
look at the non-descript headquarters of Crest National
on Romaine Street in Hollywood, CA.
In December, Crest National announced that its long awaited
Hybrid SACD production line was up and operational. This was
a significant event for several reasons.
Crest National is the first Hybrid SACD production facility in
the United States and North America. The launch of Hybrid SACD
production at this plant was also a welcome addition to record
labels producing Hybrid SACDs since it provided a key new source
of capacity. Shortly after the production line was launched,
I was invited to take a tour of the plant.
After arriving in Los Angeles, I took a taxi ride to Crest National.
Crest National is located in an industrial area in Hollywood.
When you arrive at Crest National, you notice that the plant
has several buildings at the site. After getting buzzed in by
security, I went down some stairs and met my hosts for the day:
Bob Freedman - Senior Vice President of Technical Operations/Optical
Media at Crest National, Philip O' Hanlon - Owner of On a Higher
Note, the U.S. Distributor for Halcro Super Fidelity Amps and
Michael Sabre - President of Eggleston Works Speakers.
An Orientation About Crest National & their Hybrid SACD
Line
Bob Freedman ushered us into a conference room with a white board
to tell us a bit about Crest National and how they came to be
the first Hybrid SACD production line in the United States and
North America.
According
to a Crest National press release, "Crest
National is one of the world’s leading media facilities
with over 40 years of experience providing motion picture film,
video,
audio, language and DVD/CD services to major film studios,
record labels, software companies and industrial clients the
world over."
A
handful of Cyclo-olefin Copolymer pellets before
they are poured into the injection moulding machine
to produce Hybrid SACD discs.
Crest National currently produces CDs and DVDs at this plant
as well as Hybrid SACDs. In the past year, Crest produced over
25 Million optical discs at this production facility.
Freedman told us that the Crest National SACD production line
is not only the first Hybrid SACD production line in the U.S.
but it is also the first fully automated SACD facility in North
America. The initial SACD line, which is now operational, will
produce 15,000 Hybrid SACDs per day when it is up to full production.
This line will be operational 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.
Crest National is already in the process of installing a second
Hybrid SACD production line which will be operational in Spring
2003. Additional Hybrid SACD production lines will follow as
SACD production demand increases.
In terms of SACD pressing equipment, Crest National is using
the Singulus Spaceline SACD Manufacturing Line equipment that
we featured in an earlier
High Fidelity Review story. According
to Bob Freedman, Singulus is the "world leader in optical
disc equipment" with
its equipment currently being used in the production of over
60% of all DVDs made worldwide.
Freedman said that when Crest National decided to add SACD production
to its list of services, they approached Singulus and worked
with them on the features and specifications of the Singulus
Spaceline SACD Manufacturing Line equipment. Barry Singer of
the Crest National technical staff then took the Singulus equipment
and added to it to achieve the end-to-end automated Hybrid SACD
production line that Crest National wanted.
Cyclo-Olefin vs. Polycarbonate Materials for Hybrid SACD Discs
The
operator of the SACD production line prepares
to launch a production run of Hybrid SACDs.
Bob Freedman is not only a Senior Vice President at Crest National
but he is also a chemist. This became very clear during our discussion
of the chemistry behind the Hybrid SACD discs produced by Crest
National.
In the past, Hybrid SACDs were made from Polycarbonate, the same
material that most CD and DVD optical discs are made from - at
Crest National and other optical disc plants. In the case of
Hybrid SACDs made at Crest National, they have decided to follow
a different path.
Crest National uses a material called Cyclo-olefin Copolymers
that Bob Freedman says offers several advantages in Hybrid SACD
manufacture. Some of the key advantages of this material according
to Freedman include:
· Cyclo-olefin SACDs do not require
the addition of a "face
coating" on the disc to keep moisture off the CD layer
of the disc. This eliminates the need for the caution labels
now
found on some Hybrid SACDs about not using cleaning or anti-static
solutions on the disc surface which may remove the SACD's face
coating.
· Cyclo-olefin SACDs have a higher level
of transparency which makes it easier for the CD Audio layer
to be read by the
consumer's optical disc player.
· Cyclo-olefin SACDs also have slightly less measured
jitter (3% less) than a polycarbonate SACD.
In summary, Freedman says that "Manfacturing SACD hybrid
discs using cyclo-olefin based plastics, as opposed to polycarbonate,
allows us to produce discs which will exceed all of the SACD
specifications, use a stable manufacturing process with a high
The
clear discs of Cyclo-olefin move along the replication
line before being stamped and coated with silver.
process
capability, and produce a disc with the ruggedness and life
expectancy consumers have come to expect from CDs and DVDs."
A Tour of The Plant
After this orientation, Bob, Philip, Michael and I headed out
to the plant to see the Crest National facility in action.
Our first stop was the area where the pressing stampers are
made. The CD layer of each Hybrid disc is made from either
a CD-R or
a ¾ inch Umatic master that is played back by a Sony
1630 PCM recorder. On the other hand, the master of the SACD
layer
is made from an AIT master tape.
The information from these tapes is encoded into a glass master
which is then plated with nickel sulfur. According to Bob Freedman,
the operators of this process use 125 amps of current to plate
the glass masters.
The next stop on the tour was the Quality Control lab where finished
discs are tested for meeting the CD and SACD specifications.
On today's tour, we witnessed the technicians testing the finished
discs of 'Soular Energy' by The Ray Brown Trio and 'Just
Friends'
by the L.A. Four on the Groove Note label.
These were the first two SACDs made at the Crest National plant
and they were undergoing final review before being shipped to
Groove Note. (Since the tour, these SACDs have made it to the
market and are now available for purchase).
At this point, Bob Freedman noted that each SACD is inscribed
with a notation that it was made at Crest National. It took
me awhile to find this notation, but with the assistance of
a magnifying
glass, I did see that the words "Mfg. by Crest National" do
indeed appear above the disc number on each of these SACDs.
Spin
processing - the disc on the left of the line
is picked up by the mechanical arm and moved
into the spin processing device on the right.
Watching The Hybrid SACD Replication Process
As
luck would have it, by the time we reached the production floor,
we were in time to watch the start of a new production run.
In this case, the replication of the upcoming Hybrid Multichannel
SACD release of 'Star Trek: Nemesis Original Soundtrack' by
composer Jerry Goldsmith for the Varese Sarabande label. The
SACD is due out at the end of February so it was being pressed
60 days ahead of that date to allow time for quality control,
packaging and all of the other steps between the disc's duplication
and release.
The replication process involves several steps:
1. Cyclo-olefin crystals pellets are loaded
into an injection molding machine. These pellets are melted
and injected into a
mold cavity under high pressure. Onto one face of the mold
cavity is mounted the “stamper” (mentioned earlier),
which transfers the music to the clear plastic disc.
2. Two clear plastic discs are produced using
the process described above - one contains the SACD music and
the other contains the
CD music. At this stage of the process, the two layers are processed
by different sections of the production line.
3. An Argon Ion laser plasma is used next to
treat the surface of each disc layer so they will stay bonded
when combined.
4. The next step is to apply a UV Curable bonding
resin to the SACD layer of the disc.
5. The CD layer is then brought over by a mechnical
arm which flips the CD disc layer and then applies it to the
SACD layer.
Finished
hybrid SACD discs are placed on spindles at the
end of the manufacturing process.
6. The disc with the combined CD and SACD layers
is spun at high speed to spread the bonding resin completely
between the CD and
SACD disc layers. This also insures that the bonding resin has
a uniform thickness.
7.
A two to three second UV curing process occurs next to complete
the bonding process.
8. A final protective coating of UV curable
lacquer is applied to the CD layer for protection.
9. The finished discs then roll off the assembly
process on to spindles which are later used to transport the
discs to the packaging
process.
The entire replication cycle is said to take only 6 to 7 seconds.
And it is as we were told earlier, completely automated from
the time the Cyclo-olefin pellets are loaded until the finished,
Hybrid SACD discs roll off the production line and on to the
spindles. Very cool!
The Next Stop In Part Two of the Report
After watching the 'Star Trek: Nemesis' hybrid multichannel
SACD being replicated, it was time to listen to some Multichannel
SACD discs. In part two of my report on the visit to Crest
National, I'll tell you about that...
Brian Moura - 07/02/2003
The
contents of this feature are exclusive to and the sole
property of High Fidelity Review, copyright
2003, all rights reserved. This feature cannot be reproduced
in whole or in part without the written permission of
High Fidelity Review. Can't see the images on this page?
Click here.
