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Adele's 25 sold 22,000 vinyl copies in its first week. Yes, that's a fraction of the total sales of 3.8 million copies sold but it's still impressive in our niche world.

The album sold 1.71 million CDs and 1.64 digital downloaded copies, which represents an amazing 49% of all digital albums sold last week and 38% of all CDs sold.

The vinyl total, according to Nielsen, was the third largest first week sales in the tracking company's history, behind Jack White's Lazaretto, which sold 40,000 week one and Pearl Jam's Vitalogy, which sold 34,000 copies.

You can be sure strong vinyl sales will continue through Christmas and beyond. So who is pressing these records? Acoustic sounds.com says theirs came from RTI in Camarillo, CA. That would be based upon the shipping carton identifying labels. However the copy I bought from Amazon does not look, feel or sound like an RTI pressing, though it is a fairly decent 180 pressing, wherever it was pressed. However, the noise level would not be acceptable for a classical or jazz title in my opinion.

On this week's Analog Planet radio show I guessed Memphis Record Pressing because that's where the latest Dylan Bootleg series 3 LP set was pressed domestically, while Optimal pressed in Europe. But that's just a guess. You can listen to "Hello" on this weeks Analog Planet radio show and judge the pressing quality for yourself.

Readers who have bought 25 are reporting varying quality, with some insisting their copy was quiet and looked like an RTI pressing, while others had noisy pressings that they felt required replacement. So what's going on?

Clearly RTI is pressing the record—or at least some of the records. I doubt Acoustic Sounds would claim that if the shipping cartons didn't say so. But also clear is that someone else is pressing as well. Could be Memphis, or could be any of a number of domestic pressing plants including United, which doesn't communicate with Analogplanet.com so I didn't bother trying.

I did call RTI and spoke with RTI's owner Don MacInnis who told me the company is under an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and so he was not at liberty to talk about any of this. So my speculation is this: RTI plated and pressed a lot of Adele records, but was not able to fulfill the entire order so RTIplated lacquers were shipped elsewhere for pressing. MacIniss's response to my speculation was "no comment" because he's not allowed to say anything. I am.