so how do you clean your vinyl albums?

Kirmuss probably did what he could to keep his unit at a more affordable price point. Probably more of his units out there in the US than Degritter or Elmasonic. Higher frequency? Costs more. Higher wattage? Costs more. Does his do the job- yes, up to a point. But I could buy his, even though his price was still a stretch. That’s a lot of records I can’t buy in the following year. After using it for a year, I’ve learned it’s strengths and limitations and now have another method to take my record cleaning to perfection…. glue! Thanks!!

 

This is how I clean mine:-

 

I just bought the new Klaudio model that Acoustic Sounds is carrying. I couldn't be happier with the results, which were an improvement over the Audio Desk Vinyl Cleaner Pro X UCM I owned. This was a surprise because the VCP X did a great job cleaning my LPs. However don't get me started on the reliability issues I had with the VCP X.

When I got back into vinyl about 4 years ago I never dreamed that I would end up paying more for a record cleaning machine, than for my turntable and cartridge. It didn't start out that way, but that is what happened as I worked my way through several other RCMs and cleaning methods. But the reward for me was most of my LPs having quiet backgrounds or barely audible background noise or hiss. Plus time is money, as they say. I traded my time for money. My cleaning cycle takes 9-10 minutes and I can walk away from the machine and do other things for all but less than a minute. 4 years ago I would have laughed at you if you told me this I would pay this much to clean my records. I also would have laughed at you if you said a really clean record can be as quiet over loudspeakers as any other digital source. Record noise is what drove me away from the format for over 30 years.

 

I turn on the heater on my US cleaner and when it shows 30C I put 3 Lps in the bath.
3 rotations @ 10 minutes each for a total of 30 minutes.
By then the temp is usually around 39-42 C

 

Friend, don't pole vault over mouse turds by making it more obsessive, costly and ridiculous than it needs to be by reading a lot of obsessive crap online from a lot of obsessive 'buy happy' people. Cleaning records doesn't require a space lab with special medical grade distilled waters / hard to find chemicals / blah blah blah and super expensive machines. I have an old VPI . . . I put a record on it, squirt some goop on it / vacuum it / play it. Simple. That said, no way I would pay the going price for them. I'm sure there are cheaper options these days though I have no idea what they are because I don't keep up with all the crap companies are pushing on people or the things people fall for just to enjoy music. I'm sure there have been good suggestions for simpler methods. Even simpler / less expensive than I have, which would make sense. The thing is, consider how many records you have and the cost of cleaning each record per cost of the record cleaning machine. It may not even make sense to go deeper than something really simple. Some people are buy happy and don't consider that just so they can possess 'MORE' needless stuff. Most likely we ALL have more than we need to enjoy music.

 

There are plenty of reasons to regard this "residue" conjecture with great skepticism:
(a) the glue comes off complete in one very tenacious solid piece
(b) PVA cleaning actually reduces the collection of residue on a stylus in my experience
(c) a strong static charge is left on the surface after a peel suggesting that the glue is clingy enough to take even surface ions with it
(d) it is very hard indeed to find complaints on the web that appropriately pure PVA peeling has left any kind of residue
(e) the method was recommended at the BBC which had considerable research resources to spend on this kind of thing
(f) on this forum and elsewhere some fairly orthodox scientific/materials explanations have been offered for why hardened PVA will detach completely from a primarily PVC surface
(g) no plausible chemical explanation has been provided, with any evidence at all that any residue is left

I was just pulling your leg ;-) Peace and stay well indeed, to you and all shf members!

 

My experience of carbon fibre brushes was that they made things worse. Haven't used one since the 80s.

 

Yep. And you aren't really removing the surface detritus, you are pushing it around, perhaps going sideways with the brush. I've tried all kinds of dry brushes over the years for touch up post cleaning that may be required simply from having the record out in the open.

 

Used dry, I agree, they leave most everything behind.

Misted with a tiny bit of distilled water, though, and they work great. Three brushes below, each misted and used in left to right order on a record that didn't even look THAT dirty, actually. As you can see, the first brush got more than the 2nd, which got more than the third. After playing the first side, the brushes are dry and the debris easily knocked off w/ an old credit card. Occasionally I clean the fiber tips by rubbing them against a 3x5 index card.

 

I use an old VPI 16.5 vacuum machine, some distilled water, L'Art du Son soap and a couple of fibre brushes for scrubbing discs.

My routine is soap and brush #1 (soap brush) scrubbing sideways AND also following the grooves.
By going sideways and scrubbing you can see the surface tension break and the liquid flow into the grooves finally.
Then I switch to following the groove and you watch as a ton of brown goop comes out of the grooves.
Then after a vacuum I start over with clean distilled water using brush #2.
Same scrub and flush but no soap---just water this time.

Then I turn it over to side one again as it never fails there's some spotting left from the vacuum platter being wet and smearing the other side of the record!
So I rinse that side one more time and check all is well on both sides (clean AND dry).

Using this method has provided nice quiet backgrounds.
These stay clean for several playings without getting worse.
Sometimes the more I play an old record the quieter it gets after multiple rounds through the machine!

 

I like my angle grinder for the really dirty ones.

 

How about triboelectric scale and the act of peeling the PVA polymer from the PVCa record causing the development of static charge with the record material being mostly PVC and being very negative on the triboelectric scale - The Triboelectric Series, Bill W. Lee, David E. Orr; ©2009 by AlphaLab, Inc, The Triboelectric Series - AlphaLab, Inc (alphalabinc.com).

 

I think that's why the old Discwasher was so universally popular.

 

Respectfully, nope.
I have been collecting records literally since the 1960’s.
Back then it was the dragging the ole discwasher brush across the spinning record.
If you were an OCD collector who handled records with extreme care every single time for the last fifty years that brush might maybe be enough.

If you lived in the social, partying, youth revolution, counterculture real world where you played records in pot, tobacco and alcohol fueled environments your records were going to suffer.

Most of us didn’t treat records as the fetish items they have become but treated them as an everyday part of life.
So for many of us cleaning records is an absolute real thing that is needed and absolutely works.

For me logic dictated that vacuum based cleaning with a solution and vacuum drying would work best for me and it did.

My old Nitty Gritty has more than paid for itself in rescued vinyl.
I find it helps with new vinyl and I of course buy used LP’s because that’s the only way to acquire some long OOP records.

My advice - get a vacuum based machine. I swear to god they make a difference.

At some point I might try the ultrasonic method but I’m good so far.

XXXOOO

 

I did some research, and I am not sure what is currently being used (simple wood glue) is what the BBC actually used - A modern version of the BBC record-peel cleaning solution (radagast.org). I searched RADIO / BROADCAST HISTORY LIBRARY: Thousands of magazines & Publications ALL FREE (worldradiohistory.com) and came up empty. Audio Amateur assets were sold so they are not in the public domain, so they are not available at the worldradiohistory site (which is just a wealth of knowledge) so, it's hard to verify the accuracy of the details of the "..modern version...".

 

If you are curious here is the Discwasher patent - 1498409355778615785-03951841 (storage.googleapis.com). The big claim being the fungicide Sodium Azide (not sure about the big concern with fungus) which turned out to be highly toxic, but it found a new home - it's the explosive used to generate nitrogen in auto air bags. Otherwise, given the Discwasher solution, if used every play it becomes essentially layer after layer of cleaner residue; ergo most used records can benefit from a full wet cleaning process.

 

Yep, I know I looked at that a few times. I talked to Bruce as well several years ago- nice guy. He was still tinkering. I had hoped to do an article about him, but it never happened. Oh, well. I had a DiscWasher back in the day too. I think we all did, along with the Parastat, the Dust Bug, a Decca brush, a Hunt Brush and who knows what else, all down the memory hole of audio accessories.

 

I read the part about the chemical used to mitigate static. Yup, tons of static after the big peel! More than I’ve ever encountered on an LP. It was hard for me to tell what and how much you could add to the glue for static control. He listed a whole new home brew recipe and that’s where I lost it.

I used my Furutech DeStat III to deal with all that static I got.

 

I remember a couple of oddball cleaning devices that I've used at some point in the past. One was a velvet brush that had a hollow handle with a little plug on the top. You were supposed to put some kind of anti-static solution on there and then wipe the disks with the damp velvet.
The other was a sticky plastic roller that looked like a small paint roller. You rolled it over the disk, and when coated in debris you unclipped the roller and washed it in soap and water. It came with a plastic strip to roll around it when not in use, like a piece of cling film. It did work, in that it gradually got covered in dust and became less tacky to touch, but probably pushed as much crud deeper into the grooves as it lifted off.

 

Yes, as the video of my PVA process showed, several squeezes with a Zerostat on both sides pays back all the static generated by the peel, and in a decent sleeve the record will remain static-free thereafter. A squirt with the Zerostat is routine record-care for me anyway. I take the very high static coverage as an indication that the glue has pulled away everything but the PVC/record solid. The static is good news, and quickly neutralised.

 

You would need to be looking for an additional hobby to follow the instructions on that radagast page, and I'm certainly not going to add corrosive toxins in order to leave a permanent anti-static residue on my records. I just buy a carton of Unibond, put it on my records, peel them, and neutralise the static, often while listening to another record. Painless, no alchemy, 100% success rate. It doesn't need to be complicated or expensive.

 

I have a KAB EV-1 that I bought years ago. Yes you have to turn your own. And yes you have to buy a small vacuum cleaner (try Walmart for $25), but it works quite nicely. I've taken sticky smoker owned records - and with the right cleaning material - got the LPs into a listenable state.

 

The first you mention is the Watts Parostatik Disc Preener. I had one. Supposedly superior than the Discwasher.

 

"Benzalkonium chloride - this is optional but highly recommended. BZC is a quaternary ammonium compound, which acts as a surfactant (reduces the surface tension of the water and helps the solution spread into the grooves), cleaner, biocide (kills bacteria and fungi), and anti-static agent.".

This is a cationic surfactant - commonly used in many anti-bacterial 'soaps', and in the age of COVID, you are probably exposed to it every day, and variations are in shampoo and are in anti-static clothes dryer sheets. Quaternary ammonium compound commonly called QACs are sometimes ingredients in record compositions to minimize static.

There are many people that wet clean records with HEPASTAT 256 which is an anti-bacterial alkaline cleaner for the post cleaning anti-static properties. Cationic surfactants aside from being able to kill viruses are very hydroscopic (high affinity for water) and positively charged, so the residue absorbs water from the air (good to about 35% relative humidity) neutralizing static. Industrial anti-static sprays generally have QACs.

I do not recommend cationic surfactants for record cleaning, but there are many that shall say we say swear by it, just as you support use of PVA glue.

Peace, and stay well.

 

Best way to clean an Lp is to buy its CD counterpart and toss the vinyl to the trash. Crystal-clean sound with no parasitic noises, improved dynamic range, a way cheaper pricetag, and convenient in every respect !