Throwback Thursday: Vestax’s VRX-2000 and the Dubplate You Could Make at Home

Throwback Thursday this week takes us somewhere slightly odd. Not a record, not a club, but a machine. Every so often a piece of kit comes along that feels like it shouldn’t exist, and the Vestax VRX-2000 is one of them. A vinyl cutting lathe you could put on a sturdy table at home and actually use. Released in 1999, built in Japan, and reportedly three years in development across acoustic, mechanical and electrical engineering, it was Vestax having a proper go at something the big lathe manufacturers had kept locked away in mastering rooms for decades.

For anyone who didn’t live through the dubplate years, that’s the bit worth dwelling on. If you wanted an exclusive cut before the VRX, you needed a Neumann or a Scully lathe, a room you’d probably have to reinforce the floor of, a frankly ridiculous budget and a level of skill that took years to acquire. Vestax took all of that and tried to fit it into a box weighing 26.5kg. Whether they entirely pulled it off is a longer conversation, but the ambition alone earns respect.

A word on Vestax themselves, because the company is half the story. They were founded in 1977 by Hidesato Shiino, and oddly enough they started out making electric guitars. Through the 1980s they moved into cassette multitrack recorders, taking on the likes of Fostex, Yamaha and Tascam, before finding their real home in DJ culture. From the early 1990s they built mixers aimed squarely at the emerging turntablism scene, talking directly to DJs like Q-Bert, Shortkut and Rhettmatic to work out what scratch DJs actually needed. The PMC-05 series came out of those conversations. They gave us that gorgeous weighted crossfader, the straight tonearm that improved tracking force for juggling and scratching, and later the PDX turntables that went toe to toe with the Technics 1200 and 1210. They worked with Q-Bert on the wild QFO, and in 2006 the VCI-100 controller more or less wrote the template every digital DJ controller has followed since. In other words, this was a company that genuinely innovated, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes oddly, and the VRX-2000 sits right in that tradition.

The clever part of the VRX is that it’s an all-in-one. Input limiter, compensation EQ, the drive amplifier (80W a side, built in, so no monstrous external power amp), the cutting arm, a separate playback arm and the cutting head itself, all in the one chassis. You feed it via XLR or RCA, with a -10, 0 and +4dB attenuator switch so it’ll behave with whatever you plug in, and there’s a phono output so you can drop the playback arm and hear your cut straight away. Stereo VU meters keep an eye on what’s going into the head, there’s a ±10 per cent pitch control for both cutting and playback, a manual wheel to set the cutting arm, and a little ioniser that pumps out ions to kill static and stop the swarf clinging to everything. Thoughtful, that last one. Anyone who has dealt with static off fresh vinyl will appreciate it.

At the heart is Vestax’s own VCH-1 head, an air-cooled V-drive stereo design with a sapphire stylus. The two magnetic drivers sit at 90 degrees to each other in a V shape, which is what gives it the channel separation for stereo. The stylus life is somewhere in the 200 to 300 minute region depending on how hard you push it, and the head was built to be serviceable, so if the coil burned out you could swap it rather than bin the whole thing. When it launched, the VRX-2000 listed at around £6,000 to £6,500, which tells you straight away this was never really a toy.

You cut onto Vestax’s own blanks, branded Hermodisc (you’ll also see it written Harmodisc). The pitch is that a cut Hermodisc holds up almost like a commercial pressing, with output dropping less than 6dB even after a hundred-odd plays. You could also cut lacquer and acetate, which is where the dubplate crowd’s ears prick up. Run times are about 12 minutes a side at 33⅓ and 9 at 45, though some listings quote up to 14, so take the figures as a guide rather than gospel. Crucially, this wasn’t plug-and-play. Setup needed genuine know-how, and Vestax actually required you to attend a training session before they’d hand one over. Some sources needed proper analogue treatment, high-frequency limiting, master compression, the lot, before the head would behave.

Here’s the part I love. Back in 2006, an audio writer ran a piece declaring the VRX-2000 the final proof that vinyl was clinically, totally dead. The logic being that loads of people claimed to love vinyl but almost nobody actually owned a lathe to cut it, so the format was running on fumes. Reading that nearly twenty years on, with vinyl sales where they are and small-batch cutting services everywhere, it’s a beautiful bit of wrongness. Vinyl wasn’t dead. It was just having a quiet lie-down.

And the VRX itself has had the last laugh. These barely come up for sale, and when they do they hold their money. A serviced, fully working example is currently listed on Reverb at around £5,600, which is not far off what it cost new a quarter of a century ago. Vestax themselves went under at the end of 2014, with debts north of 900 million yen, which only adds to the mystique and the maintenance anxiety in equal measure. The founder did briefly try to revive the name in 2016, but the original company was gone.

So is it the best way to cut your own records? Probably, if you’re serious and you’re not buying a full lathe. Is it the sensible option? Not even slightly. But sensible was never really the point. The VRX-2000 was Vestax betting that ordinary obsessives wanted to make their own records, and a quarter of a century later that bet looks a lot smarter than the people writing vinyl’s obituary.

by Damion Pell

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