Located on East Cold Spring Lane, Recordings Incorporated was owned by Burgess MacNeal and was the Baltimore area’s major record pressing plant. Many artists from the region had their records pressed there on labels such as Segue, O’Dell, Zenette, Wango, Monumental, Ru-Jac, Hope, Pulse, Wynwood, Chariot, Bay Sound, Kaymar, Greenbrier, Strings, Roc-Ker, and dozens of others. The plant was originally in the old building beside Flite 3 which was later a storage building for the studio. It was later purchased by Jack Best and moved to Hunt Valley where he set up shop and renamed it ITI.
Recordings Incorporated engineers included George Massenburg, Victor Giordano, Richard Roeder, Richard Kunk, and Louis Mills – who apparently had differences of opinions with Best, and he re-rented the old Recordings Incorporated building and started Flite Three Studios.
Massenburg developed the parametric equalizer in 1969, and so revolutionized audio recording and mixing. He later moved to Los Angeles and worked with many recording artists, earning a Grammy Award and many other awards and honors for his work.
The pressing plant remained in the Hunt Valley industrial park until ITI went out of business. It was then revived as SONTEC and moved to Cockeysville near AAI Corp. where it operated for a while before once again going out of business.
John Ariosa (Sheffield Studios) eventually bought the plant and put it into storage. It was later decided that it was not worth trying to put back together again so he sold it to a man who was going to move the entire operation to an island off the coast of Florida. All the presses were packed in a very heavy container and shipped. The last word ever heard about the plant was that while the crate was being unloaded from the ship a cable broke and the container crashed to the dock… and that was the end of the RI pressing plant.
