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Main >> Previous Updates >> October 2003 >> October 02, 2003 >> Article ID 1923
 Your Holiday CD Begins In A Plastics Lab At Bayer | Type: Internet Article |
| | Your Holiday CD Begins In A Plastics Lab At Bayer | Dec 21, 2000 | by Stephanie Franken
Christina Aguilera, clad in a sparkly halter top, can be brought home for the holidays at a cost of $13.99 from Amazon.com. Aguilera's compact disc, "My Kind of Christmas," features the Wexford teen-turned-pop star singing original songs, old carols such as "O Holy Night, " and, as her publicists tout, "Mel Torme's immortal 'The Christmas Song,' reinterpreted by Christina as an up-tempo dance track."
Production of the CD involved the work of a 70-piece orchestra, Grammy-award-winning songwriters, and a host of production people and back-up artists.
It also involved a bunch of Pittsburgh scientists in white lab coats and thick goggles, who take music so seriously that they refuse to listen to it, while they work.
The scientists, members of Bayer Corp.'s 6-person optical group, work in the climate-controlled optical media lab, where the only sounds are the humming of the massive machine that makes and tests CDs and the occasional voices of the scientists in consultation.
"We don't listen to music. If we do, we can't hear one another talk," said John J. O'Malley, Jr.
In Bayer's newly expanded, multimillion-dollar lab at its corporate headquarters in Robinson, the scientists devote their careers to perfecting the material that is used to make CDs as well as DVDs, the higher-quality discs that are expected to gain rapidly in the consumer market. They sell the material to a number of CD manufacturers, including companies that make CDs for RCA, Aguilera's record label.
Led by Ramesh Pisipati, optical disc industry manager, they work at the forefront of a long production process that ends with a crooning Christina.
All Bayer really does is sell a raw material that is used to make CDs -- but perfecting that single material requires the brainpower of several PhDs. The stuff is a polycarbonate, and Bayer's brand is called Makrolon. The material is made in plants throughout the world, but the Makrolon masterminds are local.
Earlier this month, Bayer AG announced plans to become the world's largest polycarbonate producer within the next five years, and it has invested $860 million toward this goal. The Pittsburgh-based lab will have a large role in delivering on this promise by working to improve the quality of the product.
Makrolon resembles coarse grains of sugar, and it is sold in 1,600-pound bags. But the science of perfecting that material, to ensure that Frank Sinatra always sounds just like Frank, for example, requires Bayer to know everything there is to know about CDs and how they work.
"What we are trying to bring to the party is, 'How does the plastic behave and what can we do to improve it,' " said Pisipati. In order to make these discoveries, the scientists must make CDs from start-to-finish.
To make a CD, polycarbonate is heated in a cylinder, squirted out in CD-sized globs from an injection mold and shaped. Then, it is impressed with tiny bumps that are just over a millionth of a meter from one another. These bumps represent the digital code of the music itself, and they form a long spiral which would be 3.5 miles long if it were spread out.
After the polycarbonate, now "pitted" with digital code, has cooled, it is coated with a metal and then sprayed with acrylic.
The process is done in a room with a constant temperature of 70 degrees and 50 percent humidity.
"It's a great place to be during allergy season," said O'Malley.
Inside that room, the machine that makes CDs contains "hyperfiltered" air with no more than 100 dust particles in a cubic foot. Both CDs and DVDs are read by a laser, through the polycarbonate -- so the plastic must be clear. A dust speck is like a boulder on a CD that isn't yet finished.
The Bayer lab also is newly equipped to do research and development for DVDs -- digital versatile discs. DVDs, which are used to store movies as well as music, are made through a process that is similar to that of making CDs. But DVDs are thinner than CDs, and they are double-sided to hold more data. They also have tinier pits in the plastic that are even closer together -- and more pits means higher sound quality.
One mission for the scientists is to ensure the material melts down and hardens as efficiently and predictably as possible, so nearly every CD turns out perfectly.
"If the viscosity of the material varies, you see that in the quality of the disc," said Pisipati. And every CD must be perfect, or it can't be sold.
Perfection rates can be as high as 98 percent at CD manufacturing plants, meaning only two CDs out of 100 will be pitched. Contraptions such with names such as "Dr. Schenk Inspector" and "Prometeus" test the properties of CDs and DVDs that are far too tiny for the human eye. Every CD sold to consumers is tested individually.
But this perfection is cheap for record labels that sell finished CDs, such as RCA Records, Aguilera's label.
"It is common knowledge that the cost of making a CD -- all ready to go and lacking only a bar code -- is about 75 cents," said Pisipati.
That price refers to CDs that are mass-produced. For a more moderate quantity, manufacturing costs are roughly two dollars per CD, estimated Holly Wilson, market manager for Polystyrene durables at Nova Chemicals Corp. in Moon.
Nova, also a Pittsburgh-based company, makes the material -- crystal polystyrene -- that is used to made CD cases, known as jewel boxes.
Nova gets 55 cents per pound for its crystal polystyrene, which its customers in turn make into six or seven jewel boxes that sell, wholesale, for about 15 to 20 cents each.
So the stuff that is used to make CDs -- and the cases that hold them -- costs very little. But that low cost doesn't include payment of royalties to the artist, the songwriters, the label, and other musicians and producers who recorded the music that winds up on a CD or DVD.
And for a big-label artist who uses copyright-protected material, paying all of those people raises the price to at least $11 or $12. |
 Source: Post Gazette | |
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