this is why i said you or anybody needs to do their research on this so that you can let others know just the same as i am. i dont see anybody else giving info here, so if anybody else has printed dubplates or lathes recently, speak up..sometimes you have to feel these guys out as well. did you ask them about pricing for 50 copies, for 100 copies, for 150 copies? 150 copies really isnt a lot in the grand scheme of things. the more you get from any plant, the more the price is gonna drop for the actual records themselves, but the price of production/shipping will certainly stay the same, if not increase.
lathes can be rather shitty, yeah, and especially for this kind of music because you can run into a shitload of distortion in the higher frequencies, but with polycarbonate lathe cuts, you'll get a better bass response. i dunno about pvc or lexan but i would think you'd be limited to the number of plays you can get out of either pvc or poly and that the first thing you'd notice would be a lack of bass, and then increasing surface noise. polycarbonate is also really prone to static electricity and it'll attract a lotta dust. its for these reasons i would say that for purely chip stuff, they're probably not a good idea, also why i said if you follow the criteria i laid out at the end of my last post that its for the best in anybodys efforts in getting some affordable stuff printed up. who knows, maybe you'd have to buy 200 lathes to get the price down that low.
but hey, paying $450 or 500 all said and done including taking care of your own art for 200 lathe cuts vs 100 7" cuts with no artwork or printing on your labels at rainbo @ around 900, pretty sure we're all gonna choose the former.
people are in this to offer competitive prices, just as with any business. but the time involved in doing jobs is what makes plants not able to meet the demand, theres tons of shit that can and does go wrong. some of these plants like united run 24/7, and as a result, they fuck up people's records. sometimes really, really bad. a guy i know who runs a label paid for 180g vinyl, it showed up shipped and it was standard weight vinyl. dude called and they said that the person running them overnight thought there was too much surface noise on the 180g, so they made them standard weight instead to cut down. the dude made them re-run the entire thing on the 180g he paid for, which they did, and the 180g version had less surface noise than the standard weight copies. the guy did end up with 300 extra records that he has still yet to do anything with. but yeah, the fact that they didn't call and ASK if standard weight was ok, well, draw your own conclusions about em, ahhaha. may be a good question to ask about their production routines even, ahah.
right now mastercraft has a quick turnaround time, i even heard one dude got his test pressings pack this week with a one day turnaround, archer you can currently get test pressings back in 16-18 days, you can get 300 7"s for $600 out the door if you play the options right (this doesnt include shpping or art of course), and they arent concerned with sampling or cover songs or anything like that, some places are. either of these two bigger companies might be worth looking into if anybody is looking for something to be ready for an end of summer release.