Vinyl pressing and tape duplication and printing plant in Hayes, Middlesex, operating from 1973 until 2006.
The plant was owned by manufacturer Damont Audio Ltd. thereafter.
The vinyl pressing plant opened in 1973 after Miller and Presky travelled to America to order Lened pressing machinery.
They had originally intended to open the plant in the Nottingham area, but instead the plant was opened in Hayes, on the same street as the original EMI Records plant.
By February 1977, record pressing ed for 50% of the company turnover.
In 1977, Damont operated ten Lened semi-automatic 12" presses and four Lened semi-automatic 7" presses, and had an approximate two month turnaround time.
Damont pressed for every major company except Decca.
In September 1977, WEA Records Ltd. acquired a majority holding in Damont Records Ltd. by purchasing the shares of Miller.
By February 1979, Damont was bought from WEA by the Counterparty Group (formerly SP & S Records (Holdings).
In 1980, after the closure of Pye’s pressing plant Tranco, seven presses and plating equipment were moved to the Damont plant, replacing some existing presses.
Also in 1980, cassette duplication starts, including manufacturing cassette singles.
In 1981, Damont added four more Lened automatic presses.
In 1988, Damont operated 15 fully automatic Lened presses, of which five were twin presses producing a pair of 7" discs on each cycle, and the other ten presses produced one 12" per cycle.
The Damont factory had its own galvanic plating department only since 1981. Later, Damont was handling the whole process with 1 Europa Film silverer, 2 Europa Film pre-plating tanks, 10 plating tanks by Europa Film and 4 by Musitech.
A Damont vinyl pressing will usually have "DAMONT" or a single "D" (at twelve o'clock) etched in the runouts. Sometimes, the runout etching can be mistaken as "JAMONT" or "LAMONT".
Other identifiers may include an etched " | " or " I " at three o'clock and a letter at nine o'clock, inherited from the equipment acquired from Tranco / Pye in 1980.
Similarly, 12" records have “dipped” labels, with two pressing rings at 35mm and 61mm.
7" records have either two rings at 33mm and 57mm or at 35mm and 57mm.
Contrary to WEA West Drayton, Damont 7”s had an anti-slip ring between 1973 and ca. 1982.
In 1991, Damont started manufacturing CDs in Hayes after purchasing the equipment from the Bedford plant of Music Manufacturers. The plant had a capacity of 2.5 million CDs a year, doubled in 1992 by adding a second CD machine and a five-colour printer.
Glass masters were outsourced for example to CDM, Malmö, Sweden (also owned by the Meekland Group). CDs glass mastered at CDM can be identified by "CDM0x" or "CDMAx" in the matrix, where "x" is a digit from 1 to 4. In these cases, you can add "Glass Mastered At" Madonna - Fever).
The CD division was renamed to CD Plant Damont (= CDP UK Ltd.), effective 01 January 1996.
