Stepping Inside Stebbing

This morning I got the opportunity to take a tour around Stebbing Recording Centre Ltd. in Herne Bay. The trip was organised by the student branch of IEEE but it wasn’t until we reached the recording studio that I realised the guy taking us on the trip was Richard Stebbing, the son of the current owner and the grand-son of the founder of Stebbing Recording Centre!

Outside the front of Stebbing Recording Studios

The first part of the tour included an inside look at the recording studios. We were introduced to Murray, who gave us a brief overview of the companyand its history in New Zealand. The founder of the business, Eldred Stebbing, passed away last year and played a key role in the early days of sound recording in New Zealand. We were taken into the mixing room where we saw all the professional equipement they used and a massive sound board. Richard gave us a demonstration of a project he had been working on to automate sound mixing. We were told that their recording studio was one of the largest in the southern hemisphere and that they have hosted many international and local artists over the years, including Jamie Cullum, the White Stripes, Kenny Rogers and Split Enz.

After our tour of the recording studio, we took a brief walk down the road to their replication and manufacturing plant. According to their website,

Stebbing Recording Centre is the country’s only fully integrated replication plant, with all stages of the DVD and CD manufacturing process carried out on site to ensure meticulous quality control and efficient turnaround.

We started on the top floor of the plant where the mastering takes place. They use stamping equipment to create a master of the CD/DVD that can then be used as a template for pressing the discs. The equipment all looked really high-tech and the smell of a new DVD spindle was quite strong.

All the empty disc spools

Next we moved downstairs to the second floor. This is where the pressing and printing takes place. They use these large automated inject molder machines to press the discs from polycarbonate plastic and then all data is ‘stamped’ onto the CD/DVD. Then they are sent to the printing machines where they can either be screen-printed or offset printed depending on the type of design. At full speed, the machines are able to produce about 100 discs per minute! There were lots of DVD stacks that had already been printed and I noticed some familiar names like Outrageous Fortune, Footrot Flats and even Justin Bieber! Finally, downstairs we saw the packaging process where they had a large scale machine designed to package the DVDs into cases, complete with inserts and covers, labels for the outside, and even boxing the DVDs into cartons at the end. We also got to meet Richard’s dad, Vaughan Stebbing, who is the current owner of the family business. Overall it was a pretty interesting experience to see behind the scenes of a multi-million dollar business. Now whenever I see a commercial DVD, I’ll have a new appreciation for how it came to be.