Got handed three test pressings last week from a label friend who’s putting out his band’s first vinyl run since 2019. Asked me to listen properly and tell him if any of them were going to be a problem. So we sat in the back of the shop with the listening rig and went through them, and it reminded me that I’ve never written down what I actually do.

So here it is.

The thing nobody tells you about test pressings is that you’re not really listening for music. You’re listening for the absence of problems. The music is the medium for spotting what’s wrong with the lacquer cut, the metalwork, or the pressing itself. If you let yourself enjoy the record, you’re going to miss things.

What I check, in order

First pass: surface noise on the run-in groove and between tracks. If there’s audible crackle on a brand new test pressing, you’ve got a contamination problem at the plant or a vinyl compound that’s wrong. This is the single most common failure I see and the easiest to spot. You don’t need a fancy stylus or a perfectly aligned cartridge. You just need to listen to silence on a record and ask whether it sounds like silence.

Second pass: low end at the start versus the end of each side. Sides one and two should sustain bass response from the outer edge to the inner. As the groove gets tighter near the centre, you lose high frequencies first and then bass authority. Some loss is physics. Catastrophic loss is a cutting decision that’s gone wrong, usually because they tried to fit too much music on a side. If your kick drum sounds like it’s wearing a blanket on the last track, that’s not your speakers.

Third pass: sibilance in vocals. This is where bad lacquer cuts show themselves. If the vocals are spitting and harsh on the test pressing, they’re going to be worse on the production run. Cheap cartridges hide this; good cartridges expose it. The plant’s response will sometimes be that the source mix has the problem. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t.

Fourth pass: stylus tracking. I deliberately bring the stylus down on the loudest passage of the loudest track. If it skips, mistracks, or sounds distorted in a way that the music doesn’t justify, the cut is too hot for the medium. This isn’t a defect of the pressing exactly, but it’s something the pressing plant should have flagged before metalwork.

Fifth pass: side warp and dish warp. Lay the record on a flat surface and look across the surface from low. A dish warp will show as a shallow bowl. An edge warp will show as a wave at the perimeter. Either one is a play-back problem. The plant will tell you it’s within tolerance. If you can hear it tracking through your cartridge as a slow wow, it isn’t.

The failures pressing plants keep producing

Three patterns I see in 2026 that I didn’t see as often five years ago.

Off-centre spindle holes are back. The volume of pressing through Australian and Asia-Pacific plants has grown faster than the QC headcount, and centring tolerances have slipped. A test pressing that’s been pressed off-centre will show as audible pitch wobble on sustained notes — most obvious on piano, vocal sustain, and synth pads. If you hear it, send it back.

Inner-groove distortion has gotten worse on long sides. Sides over about 22 minutes routinely arrive with audible distortion in the last two or three minutes. The cure is usually shorter sides, which means more vinyl, which means more cost. Plants will quietly cut the lacquers a bit hotter to keep the dynamic range up and accept the inner-groove penalty. The label needs to make a call.

Surface contamination from the labelling process has become a problem at a couple of specific plants. You’ll get a small particle defect in the lead-in or the run-out where the label adhesive or the press-and-trim process has dropped a fragment onto the vinyl. The defect plays as a single tick, repeating once per revolution. Easy to spot, hard to fix without re-pressing.

What I told my friend

Two of the three test pressings were fine. One had a clearly off-centre side two and a sibilance issue on the third track that wasn’t in the master. I told him to send it back, get a new lacquer cut, and ask for a fresh test pressing before they go to production. The plant will push back and tell him it’s marginal. He should hold the line. Once a record goes to production with a problem, you’ve got a thousand problems instead of one.

Test pressings exist because the plant is fallible. The whole point of them is to catch problems before they get pressed into a thousand copies. Treat them with that respect.