Hi-Fi Flamenco

Abbey Road is the most famous recording studio in the world. Originally a Georgian townhouse built in 1831, Number 3 Abbey Road was purchased by the Gramophone Company in 1929. The latter built the world's first recording studios in 1931. Since the engineer Alan Blumlein patented stereo at Abbey Road in 1931, the studio is renowned for their innovation in recording technology. The studio's most notable client was the Beatles, who used the studio to implement many of the innovative recording techniques they adopted.

Half-speed mastering is a technique used when cutting lacquers from which vinyl records are produced. The cutting machine platter operates at half the usual speed while the signal to be recorded is sent to the cutting head at half its normal playback speed. By halving the speed when cutting, hard to cut very high frequencies become much easier to cut since they are now mid frequencies.

To understand what makes "One-Step" so special, let's compare it to the usual process. The lacquer is transformed into a first father stamp with an inverted groove structure. This is then transformed into a mother stamp with the correct groove structure. It is only in the next step that the press stamp used to produce the disc is made. With the One-Step, the lacquer itself is converted directly into a press stamp. The result is a disc that sounds closer to the original master tape.