Bad/dirty "Optimal" pressing - The need to clean new records becomes essential

We are always up against different vinyl recipes, and the plant asks the client which one they prefer. That could explain the red Air album above. There is also the possibility of dried in Mould release agent, a substance that is meant to lubricate the lp the moment after being pressed.
I only clean the noisy records, but I always then change the inner. I suspect this as good as doubles my styli lives.

 

I just got another Optimal pressing yesterday - Mercury Living Presence Sibelius 2. It is a horrid pressing. The first side (only 20 minutes) has about 50 what I would term "highly significant" defects. By that I mean severe enough for each and every one of them to be extremely distracting and - for vinyl perfectionists - just a few of these would be enough for them to reject it. I'm not just talking clicks and pops - I mean prolonged grunge lasting about half a second each time (a typical click is only milliseconds). This is after the brand new record was cleaned on an Audio Desk cleaner which is about as good as you can possibly get.

In my experience HiQ pressings (UK) and Optimal are a real gamble. You just don't know what you are going to get. I just don't believe modern records are anything like as good as the originals from the 60s (almost my entire collection are "audiophile" reissues of 60s recordings).

 

Interesting. I didn't clean my brand new Beatles mono pressings. They are as quiet as anything in my collection. I guess that doesn't invalidate the general advice to clean used and new records before playing.

 

Not that my experience is as extensive as most, but I've got about 22 of these Optimal pressings now (and about 170 pressings from other current "audiophile" labels). I never did anything to the first 18 I bought except using Last record cleaner followed by my grounded carbon fibre brush. A lot of them are perfectly quiet - they are excellent pressings all round infact - but a number of them have terrible problems.

The last 4 I have bought however (including the Sibelius this week) have all been cleaned by the store on their Audio Desk cleaner. To be honest the only real difference I am noticing with the expensive Audio Desk cleaner on these brand new records versus the "budget" Last record cleaner (applied manually with the supplied applicator) is - possibly - a miniscule amount of added ambience detail (though I have not blind tested and it could therefore be a placebo effect) and that the stylus comes off almost perfectly clean at the end of the side (almost as if I had just cleaned it). But with the Optimal and HiQ pressings I am not really sure I can say it's done a whole lot for noise or distracting defect types of noises. Or if it has, then the records straight out of the shrink wrap must have been beyond disgusting!

The bottom line is I will continue to have the shop clean the new records for at least one good reason - and that's the perfectly clean stylus. As a listener almost exclusively to classical music, the sides of my records are generally pretty long - they can sometimes be anywhere between 28 and 32 minutes. Therefore having a perfectly clean record is important because by the time the stylus gets to the inner grooves, it's been getting progressively dirtier for the best part of half an hour. This does audibly degrade the performance at the end of the side. I've definitely noticed that getting them cleaned on the Audio Desk cleaner preserves the fidelity better as the side goes on. It was always very good - I have a Rondo Bronze which is both an excellent tracker and very good in the inner grooves as it is, but the cleaning process improves the performance further. I figure for $4.50 extra per record it is a sensible investment even though I'm not totally convinced about the sonic merits apart from what I've mentioned above.

 

I always clean EVERYTHING before it touches my table. .

 

I usually always clean new records before playing. I just got the Patty Griffin Silver Bell album and was so anxious to hear it that I didn't bother to clean it first. It looked shiny and perfectly clean to the naked eye. This one not only had some noise, but actually "skipped" in a couple of places. After thorough manual cleaning and then a trip through my home made ultrasonic cleaning machine---now all is well. I have no way to be sure, but I suspect this album had some "mould release agent" stuck to it as Markedasred mentions in post 26 above.