Sony Music Australia: The Light Years

Sony Music Australia: The Light Years
Version 2

Cinematography: Terry Byrne, ACS
Mini-cam Photography: Louis Lambert & Christopher Thorburn
Hi-8 Photography: Louis Lambert & Jon Russell
Music Editing & Mixing: Meredith Brooks
Narration: Robin Ramsay
Editor: Christopher Thorburn
Post Production Co-ordinator: David Bland
Post Production Apocalypse: Sony Australia Limited
Space Footage courtesy NASA

With thanks to:
Colin Drake
Five Bells Constructions
Grace Gibson Radio Productions
Mel Mayer
Richard Pipe
Bill Syratt

Directed by Christopher Thorburn
Produced by Louis Lambert
Sony Music Australia © 1993

A History Of The Huntingwood Operations Facility

The 3.2 hectare site at Huntingwood was purchased on 20th December 1991 with construction commencing on 2nd March 1992. The building was completed on 22nd March 1993.

The building contains 11,000 square metres of floor space and expansion to more than 20,000 square metres is possible.

The facility was designed for current and future manufacturing activities including audio post production, graphic art design, printing, cassette duplication and compact disc replication.

On 4th December 1992 the first CD was made and presented to Mr Ohga, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation Japan, on his visit to Australia. Commercial production started on 15th March 1993 with Midnight Oil's single "Truganini".

The first year of production, 92/93, yielded 11 million compact discs, in 1997, 30 million compact discs were produced and the designed expansion is capable of producing 60 million discs per annum.

Sony designed the CD replication lines to employ the latest 4th generation production techniques featuring compact integrated in line automated processes for moulding, sputtering, spin coating and quality control. They are capable of manufacturing CD Audio (Red Book), CD-ROM (Yellow Book) and CD-I multimedia (Green Book) disc formats.

On 17th March 1993 manufacturing activities were relocated from Lidcombe and consolidated into the new building. The printing operation features high speed four colour machines and consumes 700 tonnes of paper annually on a wide variety of packaging and promotional materials.

Sony Music Operations employed a total of 320 workers on a 7 days a week, 24 hour operation.

A two storey section of the building houses the energy centre and production utilities. This includes an 11,000 volt, 3,000 KVA substation, 5,000 litre nitrogen and argon gas supply, compressed air at 350 litres per second, vacuum, process chilled water, waste water treatment and 250 tonnes of air conditioning sufficient for a 12 storey office block.

Twenty kilometres of cabling carry the data and voice communications providing supervisory control over processes, computers and data acquisition. Distribution of electricity is through six kilometres of cabling in voltages ranging from 110 to 415.

The total cost of the project was $25 million.

This recording is intended for historical preservation. Copyright is held by their respective owners.
Analogue to digital conversion is a time consuming process as it must be done in real time monitoring the video tracking and audio levels with a mixing console.

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