First of all, regardless of the final medium, a recording has to be made. Producers capture signals from microphone sources (or even directly from the instruments themselves) in order to mix and master these recordings afterwards. To create a vinyl record the finished recording is sent electronically to a lathe, that cuts into a piece of lacquer. The waveform of the music forms the shape of the grooves the lathe carves. This lacquer disc is then coated with liquid metal to create the metal master (called ‘mother’) and is used to create the ‘stamper’ (the negative version of the mother). The stamper is then loaded into a hydraulic pressing machine and pressed into the ‘biscuit’ (melted vinyl paste), which ultimately creates the actual vinyl record. During playback, your record player’s needle (the ‘stylus’) follows the record’s groove and produces an electrical signal by means of a tiny electromagnetic generator (called a ‘cartridge’) using magnets and coils of wire to generate the signal. Once passed through a corrective equalizer and amplified, the electric current generated dictates the physical movement of the speakers, which effectively reproduces the recorded sound in an all-analogue playback chain.