It’s not every day that a conversation about a printing business in western Sydney takes in Justin Bieber, the London riots and Doctor Who. But Sony DADC is unlike pretty much any other printer in the country, if not the world.
Plenty of Australian printers consider themselves exceptional, but as the disc manufacturing and printing plant of one of the world’s biggest diversified technology and entertainment conglomerates, Sony DADC really is one of a kind. That’s certainly the view from printing general manager David Walling. “We are completely unique in the world,” he says.
That initials in the company name stand for ‘Digital Audio Disc Corporation’. The site in the suburb of Huntingwood is one of many. The first plant was established in the US in 1983, three years after Sony and Phillips first developed the compact disc. There are now Sony DADC sites on five continents, managed out of head office in Austria. Last year, one site entered the public consciousness for less than auspicious reasons: you might remember seeing news reports of one of Sony DADC’s facilities ablaze during the London riots.
The first Australian plant was opened in 1993, but to really get a grip on the local operation’s history, you need to step back further. It traces its heritage to The Australian Record Company (ARC), founded in the 1930s. The company started manufacturing records in Artarmon in 1950s, and added a printing plant to the site in 1970. The company was renamed CBS Records in 1977.
The Artarmon plant produced record labels and sleeves while vinyl was still in its heyday. Think back on many long players you bought in the ’70s: there’s a good chance that coveted album came into existence at an ancestor of the modern day Sony DADC Australia.
The company wears its history on its sleeve. CDs and DVDs have all but replaced cassettes and records, but printing still plays an integral part to the day-to-day operations. Walk through the main entrance of the Huntingwood plant and the first thing you’ll see – as you would in many print firms – is an old Heidelberg platen. What you won’t find in the foyers of your typical commercial shop is a cassette winding machine. Beside that, in all its glory of knobs, switches and hydraulics, is a hulking vinyl press.
Sound of music
While tapes are all but consigned to history and records remain the domain of collectors and nightclub DJs, disc replica-tion is still a central activity at Sony DADC. Enter through glass sliding security doors and you head down a long corridor that could as easily be a hospital or science facility as a manufacturing site. On both sides of this hallway, windows peer into laboratory-style clean rooms, where people in white coats work at complex production lines, lights blinking, mechanical componentry sliding and swishing.
Trolleys piled high with spindles of the latest albums – from the latest Ministry of Sound Annual compilation to 2011’s breakthrough singer-songwriter, Gotye – are evidence of the important role disc production plays at the Huntingwood site.
Amplifying this sense of a high-security facility, the staff entrance is manned by a guard and the kind of checkpoint you’d expect at a typical airport. As you might imagine, work produced at Sony DADC is high value and often sensitive. The plant is home to all sorts of pre-release products, such as the kind of Blu-ray movies or major video game launches that would have a fanboy drooling in anticipation.
There are other sensitivities to deal with. Walling points out that some artists can be particular about the release of cover art for their forthcoming albums. For some clients, all makeready sheets have to be stored until an album’s release, to ensure the buying public doesn’t get a sneak peak of the design.
But there’s no doubt that CDs are under pressure. Last year in the US, digital downloads overtook physical music sales for the first time in history, according to data from research body Nielsen and music publication Billboard. In the US, the fall in CD sales led to the closure of Sony DADC’s New Jersey plant in January 2011. While Walling points out that CD sales have actually undergone a resurgence over the past year, it is clear that printing is not the only industry being forced to rapidly evolve to the age of electronic media or face the consequences.
Walling accepts that the sectors his company represents – physical media and printing – are both under pressure. But he remains optimistic about the opportunities for Sony DADC. “The only way for us to expand is to gain more market share and expand our capabilities and that’s what we have done quite successfully over the past two years by winning more major entertainment clients.”
The usual suspects
It should come as no shock that Walling’s team is a key print supplier to Sony Pictures, Sony Music and electronics arm Sony Australia. But you might be surprised to learn that the company also supplies other studios. All the print jobs produced at Sony DADC are won through a competitive process, including contracts for the mother brand. Walling says Sony DADC has to perform on service and price to secure work both for its parent company and for third-party clients.
You might assume Sony DADC has only started pitching for these kinds of external clients in a bid to grow its share in a diminishing market. You’d be wrong. In fact, the company has always supplied a wider client base.
“In 1974, the company probably did more third-party work than it does now, such as milk cartons, brochures and annual reports,” says Walling. He explains that when it was geared up to produce record sleeves, the print site was better suited to produce commercial work. Over time, as technology has changed, the print operation has evolved to become more specialised.
Walling wears that specialisation as a badge of honour. “We are the only full solution in the Australian market that can provide all these services for the entertainment world. The environment downstairs is set up very, very specifically for our market. If we were to go outside that area of expertise, we would probably find some challenges, which is why we don’t pit ourselves against the commercial world. We fit in this niche market of printing, we do it incredibly well and incredibly efficiently.”
“Nobody has the offering we have. For argument’s sake, if a major entertainment client came to us and said ‘we want this disc, we want it replicated, packaged and distributed into the marketplace’, we can do all those three elements. Whereas some clients go to this printer for the print, this disc replicator for the disc replication and this distributor for the distribution, and so they are having to circumnavigate between three suppliers, we can do it all.”
Walling bills the firm as the best end-to-end provider to this kind of home entertainment work. Honing this specialisation has been a focus of Walling’s stewardship. He has been there four years, originally as operations manager but recently given the more appropriate title of GM.
A native Brit, Walling did his apprentice-ship on the kind of Heidelberg platen that now sits in the foyer (that one is just for decoration: there’s another one very much in active duty in the press hall). Under Walling, Sony DADC Australia has continued to invest in its niche. With this aim in mind, the site has seen further investment in digital hardware. Sony DADC already runs a pair of Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 102 presses, installed in 2007. In 2009, it overhauled CTP with a new platesetter from Agfa.
Production printing is capped off with a Ricoh Pro C901. Of this production digital workhorse, Walling says Sony DADC managed to even impress Ricoh with the way it approached colour management on the production machine.
Colour of money
“We fingerprint profiled all of our printers: digital and large-format and the Heidelberg presses. Let’s says we are printing a DVD slick. We might offset print a run of 10,000 first. Then the client wants a top-up of 150. We could do that on the Ricoh and to the layman, the colour quality of the two would be identical,” he adds.
Rather than turn to any one of a number of consultants who specialise in this field, the team set up these profiles themselves. Walling explains how Sony DADC came to have this kind of expertise internally.
“We have the knowledge internally. I have a couple of key players on the staff, one of whom who had been through it before in the UK. There were two people driving it, a pre-press guy and a printer who is extremely knowledgeable. He is probably the best offset printer I have seen in my life. I was lucky to have the two guys on the project.”
Walling says these in-house technology smarts extend to the litho department. “We run 100% alcohol free in the presses. We have an environmentally friendly alcohol substitute and use zero percent in our fount solutions on the presses.”
Plenty of printers have mulled the idea of going alcohol free. The reason there aren’t more sites is simple: it’s tough. Sony DADC replaced the dampening rollers on the two SM 102s, using hydrophilic dampening rollers to transfer the water better. The water is actually drawn from a rainwater tank on site, with numerous filtration systems in place before it hits the press. Walling admits there were challenges in getting the ink-water balance right for optimum colour consistency.
“That’s why people who try to go alcohol free tend to end up at 1-2% because it gives you a much larger window of success, but we nailed it and the presses are running as well as I have ever seen an offset press run.”
Walling says that beyond the health and eco advantages, eliminating alcohol has also helped quality. “Without alcohol, the colours are more vibrant because alcohol washes out the ink.”
Bold and beautiful
These vibrant colours are on display the moment you walk through the doors of pre-press. The walls are adorned with more posters than a video store, pinned up beside glossy A1 sheets to advertise the latest PlayStation game and stickers from recent Sony promotions. A lifesize Justin Bieber standee watches on with an adolescent pout. One table is artfully decorated with high-end box-set packaging and POS work for major movie releases. Most of this work is produced in-house in an ideas workshop that is as bright and colourful as any room you might find in any print shop in the country. Machinery-wise, the area is dominated by a Fujifilm Acuity Advance HS 3545 and an EskoArtwork Kongsberg cutting table.
With help from these two devices, the team – as much paper engineers as printers – dream up new and interesting POS work. This kind of innovation has helped the firm sniff out new revenue streams by solving problems the client didn’t even know existed. For instance, Sony previously displayed its Blu-ray players in store on plastic stands manufac-tured overseas. Walling’s team stepped in, and devised a new unit made out of cardboard, which is structurally more stable, more environmentally sustainable and flat-packs for easy distribution. In one corner stands a scale model of a Tardis for a Doctor Who promotion. It is 100% constructed from cardboard.
As you can imagine, all this creativity and colour makes the company an appealing place to work. But beyond the enter-tain-ment value, Walling tries to create a workplace culture to ensure Sony DADC is an employer of choice. As a company that supplies the retail market with the must-have items that fill Christmas wish lists, the company sees radical peaks and troughs around the holidays. It makes the most of this with a formal training schedule for staff in the off-peak months.
The graduate
This was in evidence at numerous industry awards evenings last year. Sony DADC printing machinist Scott Mohammed took to the stage nearly as often as Offset Alpine. In May, he was named the LIA’s NSW Graduate of the Year. In August, he took home five gongs at the Sydney TAFE Graphic Arts awards night. Then in November, he secured second place in the GAMAA-LIA Graduate of the Year awards, winning a trip to Drupa 2012 in Germany.
But even without this attention to staff development, there are other reason why Sony DADC is an attractive place to work. Who doesn’t love movies, music or video games? All that bright, bubbly pop culture must get into the atmosphere of the place. As someone who has done his time in typical commercial print shops both here and in his native England, Walling says there is a special feel to Sony DADC.
“The products we print downstairs and the discs we see packaged up, you relate to that stuff in everyday life, unlike some printers’ work: monthly reports that you just churn out. Some of the packaging we do, you can get a lot more satisfaction out of what you’re doing. It’s in your everyday life, whether it’s CDs, DVDs, posters – or three-quarter life-sized Tardises!”
Factfile
Staff: 40-plus
Based: Huntingwood, Sydney NSW
Established: 1983
Equipment: Two Heidelberg SM 102s, Ricoh Pro C901, Fujifilm Acuity Advance HS 3545
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