Di I really need to clean my LP's?

"unless you wear a clean suit in a clean room, you need to clean."

@emrofsemanon , That is wrong. For decades all I used was a conductive sweep arm and a dust cover during play. Some dust remained in the run out area. I would still be doing this had I not been given a bunch of 78s which were fungus infected filthy.

You can tell if your records are dirty. Your stylus will collect it as a gob surrounding a stylus. This is not the lint the stylus picks up. The lint is a sign of trouble. A gob on the stylus is trouble. My stylus hardly ever needs cleaning. At some point I will publish pictures.

Yes, ABSOLUTELY clean your investment. Sometimes, brand new albums need cleaning even more than a decades old album. There can be a variety of factory contaminants, vinyl fragments and oils buried in the grooves. Frankly, I am amazed this is even a question. I ultrasonically clean every album when I get it, and then a short clean every six months. I can show you my filter after cleaning brand new, and visually perfect used albums. It get black. 

Not entirely new to this.

I’m still using a 45 year old Discwasher I bought new with a B&O Beogram TT.

Lately I’ve been using an ultrasound cleaner (basic 12" inside 3 transducer model from Amazon along with a clamp-on 2-disc spinner gadget) and getting VERY good results considering all the stuff that settles out at the bottom of the tank.

I do this with new records.

Why?

When I use the discwasher on NEW, out of the wrapping - still, oddly, PAPER, especially for 40-50 year old LP’s - I get a YUGE collection of white dust at the outer rim of the disc with less towards the center.

So, yeah, I clean them first, and go over them with a carbon fiber brush very lightly after playing to pick up any subatomic particles (🤨) released by the diamond-vinyl interface van der Waals forces.

I bought a NEW in plastic, Miles Davis live at the Blackhawk LP from 1957 and, upon opening, found there was NO paper liner at all and the disc had FUSED to the outer cardboard (non-returnable purchase).

I FINALLY found one Mint- that’s just fine, but it took me FOUR tries to get that as the other two were damaged by bad styli and had ingrained dust that jsut wouldn’t come off. Some discs are like that.

I put ALL my LP’s in archival quality rice-paper backed liners since around 1980 and again lately at the recommendation of a former patient who worked at the Nat’l library of congress as an audio archivist (he gave me a CD once with the entirety of the Nixon tapes, including the missing 18 minutes which he and many others had attempted to recover to no avail, and White House recordings of Duke Ellington, Johnny and June Cash, others).

I think they’re a good investment as the fewdozen records I kept and filed away 40 years ago have very little to no dust or noise on them.

Clean your records, store them properly, ignore your well-meaning friend.

JMHO.

my recent post was misunderstood, i meant to say that UNLESS one lives in a sterile  room with clean protocols, one NEEDS to ALWAYS clean one's records BEFORE each use.