Not only a dedicated fan of new wave, psychedelic rock, American folk, indie rock and jazz, Dave Polster’s career as a lacquer cutting engineer has seen him work with some of the world’s greatest artists and on Grammy Award-winning projects. His work at Well Made Music operation in Bristol, Virginia, uses two fully-restored Neumann VMS-70 disc cutting lathes that have produced upwards of 10,000 lacquer masters, with cuts pressed at dozens of vinyl pressing plants around the world.

Complementing the studio’s lacquer cutting services, Senior Mastering Engineer, Polster introduced digital mastering and restoration – a transformational move that led to the acquisition, in 2021, of a Merging Technologies Horus unit and Pyramix Native Pro. This allowed the team to extend its services from a pure DSD/ultra-high resolution PCM source, dramatically improving the clarity and transparency of master lacquer cuts and prompting compliments from the studio’s artists and other discerning clients.

‘Paul Blakemore is an early pioneer of DSD and multi-Grammy award-winning mastering engineer at Concord Music in Nashville. We’d heard him rave about his Merging Horus, referring to it as the finest Digital-to-Analog conversion he has ever heard,’ Polster says. ‘Having auditioned hundreds of different converters over his 30-plus years in professional audio, we knew that if Paul endorses something, it must be incredible.’

Polster and Holley were duly invited to Paul’s studio to see his Merging rig in action. What they witnessed proved to be game-changing.

Determined to bring the same clarity and accuracy of DSD to their own cuts – without the risk of damaging irreplaceable analogue master tapes – Polster later met with Merging representatives at the 2018 AES Conference in Virginia. Three years later, Well Made Music received its first Horus unit and the equipment has been in daily use ever since, surpassing the quality of the studio’s previous generation mastering-grade D/A conversion, with limited PCM playback.

Thanks to Pyramix Pro and Horus, the team of Polster, Holley and Associate Cutting Engineers, Michael Fanos and Harrison Hunt can now feed material into its Neumann SAL 74B lathe cutting amplifiers, replicating the full resolution of the original source, with no signal degradation. As well as its DSD playback ability, Merging’s Pyramix Pro and Horus combination also allows Polster to send three discrete stereo outputs simultaneously to the cutting rig, conserving lacquer cutting space during quieter musical passages, thus optimising groove spacing and depth.

Using a Cisco managed network switch and the highly flexible Ravenna protocol for every cut, from PCM to DSD, Polster has integrated a second redundant cutting computer set-up, in the event of the main computer experiencing technical issues. He maintains it’s as close to a ‘zero downtime’ guarantee as any mastering studio can offer, allowing him to confidently quote project timelines and meet release deadlines with ease.

The studio’s flagship project using Merging was the LP By Myself, by renowned cellist, Abdul Wadud. Cut from DSD, the album was meticulously transferred from the original 1977 master tapes by Concord Music’s Paul Blakemore, using Horus and Pyramix. The reissue was highly acclaimed by the New York Times, among others.

Eager to deepen their experience of Merging Technologies, Polster and his team at Well Made Music are excited at the prospect of Merging’s new Anubis Premium, seeing it as a reasonably priced and accessible method of capturing pure DSD recordings and transfers: ‘Anubis Premium could be the key that allows us to source higher-resolution recordings from all over the world,’ Polster says. ‘These are exciting times we live in.’