This chapter retraces shellac’s cultural and economic construction as a “perfect” phonographic resource (1890s–1950s) in the British colonial context. It explores the tension arising between shellac as an unreliable and deeply imperfect material and the industrial rhetoric of sonic perfection and fidelity, emphasizing the practices and discourses which contributed to its (artificial) standardization and cultural desirability. Throughout, the roles of intermediaries—including those involved in sampling, testing, and valuing the material—are underlined. The essay further proposes to attend to the shellac supply chain as being intermittently activated and deactivated, obscured and revealed, drawing attention to its endurance and contemporary resonances.