Is the Walker LP system necessary if one already uses a good RCM?


Before buying my beloved Keith Monks RCM, I asked BetterRecords what they used. I learned that they use the KM RCM followed by the Walker system.

Walker is not expensive but seems like a major hassle.

Currently, it takes me about a minute and a half to well clean a record.

Is the Walker system necessary? Will it make a difference?

 

mglik

I knew Lloyd Walker for a few years before his death. He was a very engaging and interesting guy, and I enjoyed my brief encounters with him. But don’t separate Lloyd who made the world class Proscenium turntable from Lloyd who marketed some devices that could be said to have been "gimmicky". Those two guys were one and the same person. First, in his defense, many/most of his seemingly cockamamie ideas actually worked. Others I would summarize in the nicest way possible as "overpriced". I bought one of his enzyme-based kits and tried to compare its efficacy to that of my VPI HW17 RCM. In the VPI, I use distilled water plus 25% lab grade isopropanol plus a few drops of Triton X100 per half gallon. I cleaned opposite sides of one of my favorite jazz vocal LPs that I’ve owned for more than 30 years now, according to the Walker Audio method vs my VPI RCM method. The HW17 squirts the cleaning solution on the surface of the LP,  brushes in both directions, and offers vacuum suction of the cleaning solution at the end of a run. After both the Walker procedure, on side A, and the VPI RCM procedure on side B, I rinsed with only distilled water and dried both sides using the vacuum suction of the VPI. I have found the rinse to be necessary to remove residua of the cleaning solution(s), and I can hear the difference if I don’t rinse. Unscientific though this comparison was, I gave a very slight edge to the Walker components over my own RCM concoction. But I also concluded that the Walker method was too time consuming and complex for routine use; the difference was not major.

I think I read somewhere that Walker uses enzymes derived from a bacterium, B Subtilis. If so, these are the same enzymes in the laundry cleaner, Shout. I am pretty sure the half-life in powder form would be very long, but I don’t know how long. Shout lasts a very long time on a shelf at room temp, even though the enzymes are in solution.

@lewm- I'm with you on the rinse step for several reasons, not the least of which is that it gives you another shot at removing the residue. Yeah, I used Lloyd's magnet to "demagnetize" records for a while- it seemed to work, but I got out of the habit of using it (partly because I didn't want that thing anywhere near my cartridge!). 

 

@lewm , If Lloyd is responsible for the junk Walker Audio sells then my esteem for him has dropped quite a few notches. Overpriced? Maybe. Stupid. Definitely. Since when is PVC magnetic? People, unless you are doing immediate back and forth   A-B comparisons you can not make a comment on differences in sound quality. The human brain is not equipped to remember what something sounded like. You can remember what you heard but not what it sounded like. You have to focus on one aspect at a time say background noise level and go back and forth comparing. It takes effort and sometimes special or more equipment to set these comparisons up so nobody does them. Men being men think they are the best listeners and assume they can make these comparisons playing one sample then down the line playing the other an make a meaningful comment. We can not. Not a single one of us can do that unless the differences are glaring.