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Yep, polystyrene. You can thank Columbia Records for that stunt. Columbia introduced the LP in '48, RCA introduced the 45 in '49. During all this, Columbia and RCA were NOT and Columbia wanted to make the 45 look bad; so, they started pressing them on cheap styrene in the early '50's. Another reason was because it was cheaper to press them on styrene than vinyl. There were some exceptions; but, Columbia pretty much stuck with styrene until at least the early '90's. A&M, Mercury, WB, and Epic were other major labels that used styrene heavily. During the late '70's, RCA started doing it. I'll tell you that it's very hard to find a decent styrene pressing these days. Those that are decent were either never played or played rarely on a good magnetic cartridge equipped turntable. I've got some styrene pressings that were "on air" copies from various radio stations; and, surprisingly, most of them still sound acceptable. Some of them have cue burn (pppsssttt sound) at the very beginning of the song from where the DJ would spin the record backwards in order to get the stylus at a point just before the song started. Rather than play them on the air, I think a lot of stations copied their styrene records to cart tape for use on the air and then kept the record put away for safe keeping.
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