How often, and how, do you clean your stylus?

@lewm You bring up a good point about the Audioquest electronic cleaner. This topic is actually worthy of a slightly deeper exploration:

- With a few exceptions, the Audioquest, Audio-Technica, Flux, & similar products are marketed as "electronic", not "ultrasonic." As noted above, they may operate at around 400Hz, far below the freq of a Degritter, or even a toothbrush.

- At those frequencies, I suspect that they clean through friction of the bristles, not through cavitation. If the latter, though, remember that cavitation requires passing sound waves through a liquid. No cavitation occurs in dry media.

- On SteveHoffman, one user posted before-and-after photos that showed the Flux cleaner to be remarkably effective. Just one use case, but still worth a peek.

- The biggest concern I’ve heard over the years about these cleaners is the risk of damaging a cartridge’s suspection or cantilever bonding. But like so much audiophile ephemera, really, who knows? Some forum doofus or online influencer makes an unsupported conclusory statement and it gets repeated ad infinitum. Why would an oscillation at 400Hz be more or less likely than one at other frequencies to physically damage a cartridge? Maybe it would, but in the absence of supporting data, that’s just conspiracy theory.

- Mikey Fremer wrote a short ad hoc review of the Flux (still posted on AnalogPlanet), but other than that, I haven’t seen much in the way of hard data. So who knows for sure if this -- or any other stylus-cleaning tech -- does less harm than good? This seems like an opportunity for a formal comparision by someone who knows what they’re talking abou. Are you listening, WallyTools?

FWIW, I’ve used an Audioquest electronic cleaner for decades and, despite mfr recommendations, I use it dry. At one point, I examined my Adcom microline stylus after many years of use (under a consumer microscope) and saw a spotless stylus. And I never heard anything that would suggest physical damage to the cartridge (assoc’d eqpt: Quad ESLs, factory-restored Quad 2 Class A monoblocks, PS Audio 4.6 passive-preamp phono stage). Years later, WallyTools professionally analyzed my higher-end Ortofon cartridge and again photographed a clean stylus. So although I'm loathe to draw conclusions from personal anecdotes, it seems as though whatever I’m doing is working. A +1 for electronic stylus cleaners?

By the way, I suggest doing a little research before using Blu-tack (or any other gel cleaner). There have been credible reports in the press of these cleaners leaving sticky residue on stylii. I seem to recall Mikey or Boisclair publishing photos showing exactly that.

And one last thing: If you’re still interested in electronic cleaners, Hudson makes a knock-off of the audiophile-targeted products that is still available on Amazon for under $25.

Of course the electronic stylus cleaners do not work through cavitation and could not possibly do so. You need a liquid medium in which to generate the bubbles.  There is no claim that I ever saw that they operate by cavitation or that they are even truly ultrasonic.  Somehow, that descriptor got attached to those gadgets, maybe because ultrasonic record cleaners are so in vogue. The Audioquest is said to operate at 480Hz, but I am sure there is quite a lot of variation in frequency from unit to unit, which is why I originally wrote "400-500Hz".  My guess is they literally shake the dirt off the stylus and cantilever.  The first time I used mine, to clean a well used Koetsu Urushi, a big gob of dust came out of the workings of the cartridge.  Which made me think that one conceivable advantage of the electronic cleaners is that they may do a decent job of shaking out dust that is on the "top side" of the cantilever, the side closest to the cartridge body, which is normally not accessible for direct cleaning, unless you're working under magnification and with fine tools.

You suggest that Audioquest mentions using their electronic cleaner "wet". Where did you see that, and how would that work? (I'll look in the owners manual, which I have here somewhere.) I am not fearful of damage from the Audioquest; the cartridge structure is well designed to deal with the frequency range of its operation, which is audible as a 400-500Hz tone.  And I use it for no more than 10-15 seconds at a time. I WOULD be hesitant to expose a cartridge to anywhere near the frequencies at which ultrasonic cleaners operate, which would probably be ineffective anyway without an aqueous bath.

Just for the record (!) the S_DUO does have a shallow distilled water bath that the stylus is immersed in. It comes with several rubber washers to make the sidewall of the bath, so that the height of it can support the cartridge with just the stylus and cantilever tip getting wet. The stylus is not supposed to touch the bottom of the water bath. As I said, very fiddly to use. However it does work (I posted before and after photos here) and I do believe it is ultrasonic in nature.

For the past few months, a DS Audio ST-50 when I feel like it, typically every 5 or 6 sides. Before that, a slice of Magic Eraser on a business card. If I can actually see anything on the stylus, I touch it first with the short- bristled Ortofon brush that came with my A90.

Humminguru s-duo. For the man with cojones. Never heard of it before now.