Can anyone tell me what process is used to produce fret wire. If I had to guess, I'd say it starts out as circular wire and then the press it or extrude it through a die.

I admit I have not seen the process myself, but I have yet to run acroos any "wire" that was not made by extrusion. There are many reasons to do it this way as opposed to a press type of operation. Pressing would limit the amount of product you could make because of the space you would have, driving up cost considerably, especially on a product that is penny's per foot (ok, maybe a buck or so a foot, but that is after shops like Stew Mac buy it from a distributor and then mark it up after the distributor marked it up from what they paid the manufacturer).

The amount of product you can make via extrusion would only be limited by the amount of raw wire you had on hand. If you had 1 mile roll of wire you could make probably several miles of fret wire. In theory at least. Extrusion also "massages" the metal and cause the resultant product to be much harder and resist wear more so than pressing would.

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