so how do you clean your vinyl albums?

Yes I have a spare laser assembly for my SA-KI SACD player.
Also I have 2000 records all cleaned on my trusty VPI 16.5 RCM using record DR. cleaning fluid. And for the real dirty one first I use MOFI enzyme followed distilled H2O to great results. Then I listen to them on my SOTA Sapphire vacuum TT. so lighten up and have fun.

 

I've got a spray solution and a brush. You should be able to find a kit at a record store.

 

In my cleaning arsenal there’s a VPI 16.5 machine and a George Merrill Hydraulic Cleaning Apparatus MKII, also VPI, MoFi home brew cleaning fluids.

 

Record doctor V

I use their fluid, then distilled water…

so far so good…

 

I hose them off in the backyard along with the dog and kids.

 

I've been working with carbon fibre thermosets quite a lot recently. It's amazing how quickly it blunts tools, whether they be drills, mills, files or saws. It's a deceptively hard material - in some ways harder to machine than stainless steel.

As for research, I blunder around with a microscope and often find signs of uniform scouring on used records. I have no idea where this is from, but speculation fuels my cautionary paranoia. No brushes touch my records, wet or dry.q

 

Two step hand cleaning usually with fitting a new inner sleeve on "new" used titles or replacing new rough almost sandpaperesqued ones.
"Make music not mud!"

 

Titebond II wood glue. Been doing that for a long time, more than ten years, and mastered the process to almost perfection. IMO, nothing cleans used dirty records better, not even RCM in most cases.

 

The uniform scouring may from the stylus playing a dirty record or from a worn stylus. Otherwise, the book Chapter VI echos your position when it says: "Once Cleanliness is Established - Stay Out of the Groove! The only thing that belongs in the groove is the stylus." I use a Teflon rod to remove incidental dust/lint from the record or a quick swipe with the Kinergetics Tiger Cloth. Although I no longer charge the Teflon rod per-se, a wipe-down with the Tiger cloth is enough and the record does not need to be rotating.

 

A retipper recently posted a link to a site showing uneven contact patch wear. Thought it was sort of interesting.

Just in case you haven't see it:
Phono stylus wear and lifetime

 

And at the same time you can prepare your salad.

 

Thanks - that's a fascinating article.

I am highly skeptical about the diagramme of a flat-faced stylus chipping chunks off the groove wall. During play, what proportion of time is spent in a silent groove and what in a mid-to-high energy groove with significant contact angle? A good proportion of time is spent with edge of the flat in contact, not the flat itself. If flats were as chisel-like as many stylus-salesmen like to suggest, then the easiest way to repair them would be to play a few of your least favourite records. This would polish away the supposed 'cutting edge' around the flat so that the limits of the flat itself are less well defined, and curvature at the edge of the flat is not much different than that of a brand new shibata or microline. Put simply, the edges of a worn flat will wear too, so don't get neurotic and do take with a pinch of salt the mostly unsubstantiated theories exaggerating groove wear. I'm not saying don't change your stylus when or before it starts to perform less well, and I'm not saying track at 5g, but a bit of common sense is in order and some contributors have an interest in your changing your stylus very often indeed.

Another area where I think the article is a bit pessimistic is in visual identification of flats. I use a cheap microscope with a light, e.g. a bright window or nearby lamp on the axis of the diamond and roll it towards the lamp through, say, 180⁰. If you watch the specular highlight on the tip of a worn diamond, when it comes to 45⁰ between the light source and your line of sight, you will see the specular highlight suddenly morph into a horizontal shape instead of a point or vertical line. This does not happen with new styluses, and is caused by the width of the flat. Look this way at a wide selection of cartridges, worn and new, and you will learn how to identify them and the stages in between. It's actually quite fascinating. Adequate microscopes are not too expensive these days.

 

I didn't describe the phenomenon very well. The minor scratches are all over the flats, not just within the grooves, and they point in every direction. They are not big enough to worry about, and I don't know if they can be heard above the noise floor, but they do appear to be evidence that at least some forms of contact between soft objects and the record surface take their toll.

Under the microscope it is surprising how little force is required to leave a permanent trace. You can easily see the path left by the stylus from one revolution on the record flats, for instance. That's why I say it's like butter at that scale.

 

I have seen the very faint surface scratches on new records. Consider how they are pressed and then stacked while still warm - How Vinyl Records Are Made | Fluance at Microforum Vinyl Pressing Plant - Bing video and used records may be from use with the older ubiquitous record changers that would play a stack of records. Additionally, the record platter cleanliness/surface and the record sleeve can all over time lead to surface scratches. However, the surface scratches unless deep into the groove area I have found to be nothing more than cosmetic.

How clean is your stylus? Has the glue left a microscopic angstrom thick residue? You're applying a glue to a non-metallic surface and you're assuming (because you do not have the instruments to measure such as a Scanning Tunneling Microscopy) that when it 'pulls' from the surface, that there is no residue left behind; and that there has been absolutely no change to the record surface. Depending on your environment, the record will have a layer of moisture that contains all sorts of ingredients - its only angstroms thick but it's there and when the dewpoint is >50F, that ionic layer is enough to avoid static charge. So, now, you're adding a liquid glue that is going to mix with what's on the record and dry, and then be physically pulled from the surface. To assume that there will be no change to the surface is a bit of a leap. But this is not to say that the change is enough to cause an audible change.

 

The article Record -Groove Wear, J G. Woodward, HiFi Stereo Review Magazine, October 1968, HiFi-Stereo-Review-1968-10.pdf (worldradiohistory.com) shows types of record wear from worn stylus. However, how the record wears can be dependent on the record composition. The RCA quadraphonic record composition was developed for long play by the Shibata profile - RCA Engineer Magazine, 1976, Issue 02-03, Development of Compound for Quadradiscs, by G.A. Bogantz S.K. Khanna 1976-02-03.pdf (worldradiohistory.com) (note that the image labels are reversed - A is B and B is A).

Otherwise, here is another deep dive into stylus wear/life - The Finish Line for Your Phonograph Stylus… - The Vinyl Press (compliments of @Bill Hart).

 

A little more info on this procedure please. So you spray the vinyl with distilled water, then circular rake it with the carbon bristle brush a few times - and then set it aside to dry? No anti-static cloth or anything? Or do you use the brush first and then spray the water?

ok, a little more info on this one too. You use their fluid, use their brush to spread it onto the album.... when do you use the distilled water? After the vacuuming?

I'm trying to wrap my head around on these little details, because as someone said, the devil is in there. So far what I've been doing hasnt been optimal - somewhere in between all this fantastic info you guys have been giving, is the right procedure for me.

thanks to everyone!! keep it coming, this is a fascinating discussion

 

If there were residue from PVA cleaning you would see it build up on the stylus after a couple of miles of playback.

I always encounter highly speculative, even fanciful, skepticism towards the PVA cleaning method whenever I post about it. Many of the reservations and fears expressed are directly contradicted by my many years of experience of using PVA to clean. I think perhaps there are many reasons for the skepticism, including the unlikelihood of the method, unfamiliarity, investment in RCM equipment, and perhaps occasionally some RCM salesmanship. Of course a bigger factor may be that people don't want to wait several hours for glue to dry before listening to a freshly cleaned record.

At any rate, I see no signs of residue or residue damage in my records which I have cleaned this way for a decade or two, and the noise clean-up can be very remarkable. I've no reason to think that the glue method doesn't do what you can see, hear and even feel from the static charge distributed over the record surface after a peel.

 

If you read Neil's book it will all make sense.

 

4 OP,

1 application of cleaning fluid, brush in, vacuum…..both sides….

then same record, same process, with distilled water and different brush….

 

Bye best system ever was the Kith Monks RCM that used a Cotten thread and RCF to clean and a vacuum to remove the fluid.
Keith Monks – KMAL – Record Cleaning Machine – RCM – RecordCleaning – Vinyl LP

 

My routine for filthy albums is to use a velvet pad saturated with alcohol. Using a lazy Susan as a platter, I rotate the pad (clockwise only) 8-9 times on the album, applying decent pressure.

I then play the record (the alcohol flashes off quickly, no need to wait). Some of the noise I will hear is static, the rest is the stuff I've softened and shifted with the velvet pad+alcohol being raked out of the groove by the stylus.

When that side is done playing, I can hit the album with a flashlight (keep the record spinning and hold the light parallel to the record) and see a mine field of debris the stylus has raked out of the groove.

Now I mist distilled water onto a carbon fiber brush (2-3 pumps from a decent atomizer, holding the brush 10-12" away), and with the album still spinning on the turntable, lightly hold the brush to the album for 2-3 spins.

Then I move onto the next side, and repeat the velvet pad+alcohol step. By the time the 2nd side is done playing, the carbon fiber brush is dry again so I knock the bristles w/ an old credit card, mist them, and brush that 2nd side.

I'll repeat this process twice for a newly acquired but filthy album.

After that, I play the album w/o doing anything pre-play, but post-play I continue to use the carbon fiber brush w/ distilled water.

My routine for new albums as well as used ones that haven't been abused, is to simply play them and then post-play brush them with the carbon fiber brush misted with the distilled water.

I've found the carbon fiber brush misted with distilled water is substantially more effective then a dry carbon fiber brush. The dry brush simply pushes crap around, the misted brush holds onto most everything it encounters.

Below is a pic of an album being cleaned using my method. This album was previously cleaned with a record vacuum as well as ultrasonic cleaner, as well as at the sink with 409 (rinsed thoroughly), but remained stubbornly noisy. Due to the level of distortion I was able to hear before cleaning it myself, I was pretty sure it was a lost cause but nope, it now plays almost like-new. I'll probably hit it with another couple rounds of alcohol to finish it up.

 

pardon the snip, but the above is exactly what I wanted to know - a post-play procedure. Then air dry and into an anti-static sleeve, I'm assuming -

 

I have not had any issues moving the albums immediately into sleeves after cleaning with my moistened carbon fiber brush. The capillary action of the very closely spaced bristles seems to result in the brush hanging onto the moisture, rather than transferring any to the album.

And I'm starting with very little moisture. Holding the brush 10-12" away from the atomizer, the cloud has spread to maybe a 10" diameter by the time it hits the brush, nearly all the water is missing the brush and landing on my feet and the carpeting.

 

I will vouch for Mr. Antin's research and methods. In a field where snake oil is prevalent, his work is based on science and experience. If you can run to $200, you can buy a Squeaky Clean Squeaky Clean Vinyl MK-III RCM 3D Printed Record Cleaner (Classic Black) vacuum attachment, a cheap vacuum cleaner and all the bottles and fluids you might need to keep you going for a good long time. I've been using this simple set up for several months now. Results are variable, but almost always improve the listening experience. The big surprise for me has been the improvement on new records. Maybe quality control isn't what it was fifty years ago when I first started buying records, but the jump in sound quality with some new purchases after a clean has been remarkable. Bass extension and clarity in particular. I was skeptical about the whole vacuum/wet cleaning/ultrasonic "industry", but now I've spent some time with a budget set-up I'm a believer.

This, for day to day care. Works fine.

 

thanks again - I appreciate your help here - Copied all this and saved to a file. As I said, devil is in the details and it helps to hear from people who have had success using the same tools I have.

I've started from ground zero, using this youtuber as a guide - and perhaps I should have started here first. Anyway, the comment here, "that guy is just pushing dust around" made me chuckle but as I continued reading, and noticing that I was doing what he was doing and the results were not great - I realized perhaps he IS only pushing dust around and I needed something more... comprehensive, for lack of a better term.