so how do you clean your vinyl albums?

What's happening in Argentina, man?

 

Vinyl got uber-expensive.

 

Yeah, it's kinda stupid here too. I was gonna come down some years ago-- for a car race. never happened. There's a dude there who makes pretty good replicas of the old pre-War Bugattis--Pur Sang. Real ones are beyond crazy money. I've been to Brazil, but not to Argentina. S.A. was nice but that was a long time ago.

 

My dad had one of those rollers- they got dirty very quickly and you had to replace the sticky paper every few days. I remember he gave up after it lifted the surface of several of his LPs. Another expensive time consuming fiddly gadget that promised to be the audiophile Holy Grail in the fight against dust and static- yes he had one of those static guns that looked like a Star Trek phaser. All very 70s. Then CDs came along and we were delivered from evil...

 

AMEN- Vinyl junkies spend a fortune on time consuming gizmos and snake oil in acid to eliminate one of the inherent aspects associated with the format- static and dust. The audiophile equivalent of putting wheels on a horse.

 

Yup; indeed ! I use vinyl but clean them just once with a poor-man method that yields great results. Don't clean new records unless the stylus gathers visible lint or dust (hapenned just once) yet I hate clicks and pops with a passion. On new records, there's little to none, but on preowned ones, it a lottery. They can look pristine and be fried, or look like they're beaten up but sound clean. Will still prefer CDs and FLAC files, and would toss the TT to the trash if I could get all of my lps' CD counterpart. It's a godd TT, sounds great, works great, but I'd love to move fwd. I own it out of inertia (the expenditure) People wows over it and are amazed at my telling them I prefer digital when everyone is into this ''analog'' trend now.

 

Once again; no snake oil when it comes to cleaning records, just chemistry and physics. Nothing more nothing less.

 

Not me. A glue clean is once per record per life, its cheap, and there are no gadgets except a Zerostat which family men have anyway for keeping small children under control.

CD never did sound real ;-)

 

so I just got a Record Doctor. I played a record I had dry-brushed cleaned about a week ago, then I did the Record Doctor once with the provided fluid, then again with distilled water, and it did indeed sound better, and several of the bad POPs I had heard on the first spin, were gone. The crackling in the run-in and between songs was still evident - I'm guessing this is vinyl damage or wear? What causes that? Is it static? I did try the carbon brush dry "hold it on the turntable and slowly drag it to the spindle" method both times, but if it was static, it didnt work.

But I can live with that.

One question I have for all you Record Doctor owners - the vacuum doesnt seem to reach all the way to the run-in edge. I noticed it was still sort of wet after the distilled water run - is this how it is, are they all like that, - or am I doing this wrong? It seems so simple and foolproof - I let it air dry a few minutes and it seemed fine. Just curious.

 

If there's some excess fluid at the edge of the album, I lightly wipe it away with a microfiber cloth. If it is at the lead in groove, you may have to slightly push down on the edge to get the slit to suck down the record at that point.

 

I actually enjoy cleaning records. Once they have been cleaned there's no reason to do it again unless they are poorly maintained. My best advise is to establish a good science based routine using science based solutions and stick with it. It you have a record that still has issues it's safe to say it is one of two things, groove damage (from the pressing plant or consumer mistreatment) or extremely stubborn particles in the groove. You then have a few options.
1. Accept the shortcomings of the record.
2. Repeat the cleaning process. (exceptionally dirty records may just need another round)
3. If it's new get a refund or replacement.
4. If you bought it online contact the seller if it isn't graded properly and ask for a refund or adjustment.
5. Try the glue method mentioned by others in the thread. (if it's groove damage go back to 1-4)
6. Try the acid soak method. ( if it's groove damage go back to 1-4)
7. If nothing works, toss it in the trash.

 

Mine does that as well, and I've seen a couple of videos indicating this isn't uncommon. When the RDV was my primary tool, my practice agreed with @hi_watt - I used a clean, lint free microfiber cloth to get the little bit of remaining fluid on the lead-in.

 

Do you think it would it make a difference if one were to spray the distilled water mist on the record then use the brush?

 

Too much water will prevent the brush from lifting anything off the surface or out of the groove of the record, it will just wash/move the loosened crud around but leave it on the vinyl.

A very small amount directly on the bristles helps them hang onto the very fine bits of foreign material which the stylus has already loosened for us.

I hope that makes sense.

 

Yes. Thanks. The atomizer I bought arrives today. I'll give it a try. Worst case scenario, I'm out $7.

 

Just remember less is more, when it comes to the amount of water.

After you've tried it a few times you'll know exactly what I mean.

 

I've just been cleaning an extremely dirty record - it looks like someone spilt coffee on it - so I quickly took some telephone snaps of the peel. Sorry for picture quality, it's just me holding my phone over a microscope eyepiece, but it does reveal a little about how well PVA moulds the grooves and pulls off anything removable.







It's quite rare to see bubbles in the peel, but in the first picture you can. Perhaps it is connected with the fact that this is about the dirtiest record I've ever seen, and this area was covered in what I take to be congealed coffee solids, which will have trapped air under the glue at first application.

In other places you can see that the PVA reaches the line at the bottom of the groove and does not generally suffer from 'non-fill'.

You can also see quite a lot of the junk that has been trapped in the glue and successfully removed, as well as the impressions of scratches and other features. You could easily mistake these snaps for the surface of a record, and I think that is a measure of how thorough the PVA method is at separating the wheat from the chaff and pulling off in one piece.

 

I'm really curious about the glue peel technique. I've tried a product called Winyl which works in a similar fashion but has far less adhesion with the record surface. it's basically useless

Can you give us some labels for the images? I'm not clear on which ones have the glue and which do not. Also, do you do any wet cleaning before the pva peel?

 

The glue I use is a very common brand of good quality PVA here in UK: Unibond. I don't know if it's the same as Titebond, but if you can't spell tigth, how can you be trusted to make glue? ;-)

The three images above were taken with my phone through a microscope eyepiece. They show three different areas of one PVA peel. There is no record in the images, just the peeled PVA stretched flat so that you can see the molded impression of the record it was peeled from.

I do not do any wet cleaning at all, ever. I haven't the patience and I'm not convinced that it's any more effective or non-destructive than PVA peeling. I would be bound to get labels wet and a noisy vacuum cleaner would make me feel as though I had become a slave to my hobby.

I enjoy the PVA process as both application and peeling are quite satisfying and I'm glad I discovered the method before investing in yet more ancillary boxes.

If you missed it, I uploaded a video of my process on page 3 of this discussion.

 

Perhaps I should pour PVA in my ear and then pull it out when dry! Might make everything sound better (and louder).

 

Cyberclean vinylcare has cleaned up records that I thought would never be playable .I find it a lot easier than using glue