Premium distilled water for ultrasonic record cleaner

Audiotomb:

On the Klaudio machines I normally do a full 5 minutes wash, and 5 minutes dry, to make absolutely sure records are 100% dry before putting them in new sleeves. I use either MoFi or Diskeeper 2.0 sleeves, based on whether I’m single-cleaning or double-cleaning, and customer choice.

I do the same with the Audio Desk machines, a maximum 5 minute wash, and the drying time is fixed at 4 minutes.

I’m doing more double-cleaning than anything else right now, that’s been very popular with customers, and I use the Audio Desk for a 5 minute wash first, and then Klaudio for another 5 minute wash and 5 minute drying. This works out well, since the Audio Desk drying power isn’t nearly as good as Klaudio’s more powerful fan, especially when the "wipers" get worn on the Audio Desk..

Aside from the expense, I don’t have room for the Klaudio "Silencer" boxes (reminds me of when noisy commercial dot-matrix printers went in something similar) since all my equipment is on two 6-foot stainless steel tables, and my old desk. I’ve got 2 Klaudios, 2 Audio Desks, a Furutech DeMag, and VPI 16.5, and a Furutech DF-2 flattener.. So it’s a bit crowded, and all of this shares space in my music room, which I’m lucky to have since it’s a "no-go-zone" (with a baby gate) for my kids 6, 4, and 20 months!

Honestly, all of this equipment is way too noisy, couldn’t these machines have been designed to be quieter, knowing they’d most likely be used in an environment (room) where the owner also wants to listen to music?! The Klaudio and Audio Desk are bad enough, but the worst offender is my VPI 16.5 which I use for pre-cleaning chores when needed. Depending on what customers send me in any given week, I can literally be cleaning for hours at a time, often late into the night after the kids have to gone to bed, so I have worn earplugs at night (when I can’t turn up my system volume) and I now use some Klipsch X7i earphones that fit snugly and offer very good sound isolation.

You’re smart to protect your hearing from prolonged exposure to the audible noise the machines make (without even knowing what the potential effects of the ultrasonics might be) otherwise you may not be able to enjoy the better sound from those super clean records!

Dave

it sounds like a great setup / business that you have

the Klaudio silencer doesn’t take up much more of a footprint at the base, but it is a bit taller

laugh, I have mine on the back end of my kitchen table except when I have guest over for dinner
good place to lay down albums sleeves and stack the ready to go and completed records vertically on two adjacent chairs

i read somewhere that the silencer even fits the Audio Deske
you might ask Tim

my friend has an audiodeske
maybe we should join forces

My lps are always dry by three minutes and I used to run the dryer at four
will go five just to make sure

the Acoustic Sounds QRP inner sleeves are great
i buy packets to get my order totals high enough for free shipping

thanks to everyone for the great thread
going well beyond the subtleties of h2o

audiotomb:

If you love records then cleaning them sounds like a fun job right? I do love wearing my Record Genie hat, as otherwise I'm a stay-at-home dad to my three relentlessly energetic youngsters, and music, or music related stuff, is my escape!

Honestly, if I didn't have some kind of part-time business going on I'd probably have gone (completely) nuts by now, although my accountant thinks I'm nuts anyway since I haven't actually make a significant profit with all the equipment expenditure in the last 3 years, so I'm hoping 2016 will be better!

If you're happy with the cleaning and drying times that you've been using, then I can't see any reason to change. It's not a fast process anyway, especially double-cleaning, and I use 5 minutes cleaning and drying to be sure I'm getting the best results possible for customers while I have their records here. It doesn't make sense for me to try to cut any corners when the whole success of what I'm doing is purely based on the results, so I just accept that it takes longer to do it that way. The only way to speed things up would be to add more machines.

I understand about the Klaudio "Silencer" being only a bit bigger than the machine footprint, but I've got my 2 Klaudios slightly angled on one end of a stainless work table (one behind the other) and access would be tricky, especially since I regularly take water samples for TDS testing to ensure quality results.

I think you and your friend with an Audio Desk really should get your machines together - On a decently resolving system, I bet you'll easily hear the difference between cleaning on only one of the machines, and cleaning on both of them. I use the Audio Desk first, and the Klaudio second, but I keep the water very clean in the Klaudio. The CVS distilled I use starts at 0 ppm and I change it out once it exceeds 5ppm. My TDS meter has 0.1ppm resolution.

I keep the inside of the Klaudio tanks clean by using a large clean microfiber cloth, getting into all the corners and making sure it picks up as much dirt as possible. There is a large area of the tank that's not visible from the "access port" on the back, so I push all of the microfiber cloth "around the corner" with chopsticks, then pull it out again, a couple of times, to try and keep that part clean. The metal threads on the access port are razor sharp, so chopsticks are safer than risking your fingers!

How do you keep your Klaudio tank clean?

I've never bought QRP sleeves, although I've replaced plenty with MoFi sleeves on records I've cleaned. They seem to be very similar to MoFi sleeves. I know MoFi had some serious problems in 2012 or 2013 with sleeves that had a powdery residue which left nasty fingerprint marks, and I've cleaned some records "with prints" for one customer that was affected. I was lucky enough to miss those problems in my personal use, and I didn't start ordering sleeves in bulk for the business until later in 2013.

Bill Hart (whart) has a Keith Monks and is definitely a believer in multiple cleaning steps, so maybe you should be experimenting with your Loricraft and Klaudio together, and please do post here about the results of trying "double-cleaning" if you can get your Klaudio and your friend's Audio Desk together for a cleaning and listening session!

One last thing, I have a customer in NYC who asked me in 2014 to do some cleaning for him, to do blind testing. He sent me a couple of 4 record box sets, and I had my wife randomly pick which record would be cleaned by which method, plus one "control" that wasn't cleaned at all. They were assigned "A", "B", "C" and "D" and then cleaned by Audio Desk, Klaudio, both, or none, and returned to the customer. I kept a note of what was what, and he told me what he thought they were after careful listening.. It's unscientific of course, but it was fun, and we did a couple of batches like that. While he couldn't tell the difference between Audio Desk or Klaudio cleanings, he did pick out the ones that were cleaned with both. I'd be more than happy to do this again for another customer if requested! 

Recordgenius, Thank you for correcting me, above. I apologize for using the term "BS"; I only meant that there was good information and perhaps less relevant information and some other information with a commercial tint.  However, I apologize also for quoting an old posting that I thought was especially erudite on this subject, when it had already been quoted by someone else.  Even if one doesn't want to know THAT much about water and levels of its purity, could it hurt? Anyway, I am or have been lucky enough to be able to get extremely pure deionized and distilled water from my lab, for the past many years, which I use to clean LPs.  (Distilled water from an outside local source passes through a built-in deionizer that sits over each of two of the sinks in my laboratory, at work. I am a biologist/virologist.)  I can get it at no cost, so I use it, but do I believe it's vital to cleaning LPs? No. I think the other ingredients of a record cleaner are more important to getting a good job done.  I don't think deionized, distilled water is sufficient by itself, unless perhaps if one also uses ultrasonics.  I think a small amount of ionic or nonionic detergent plus a little alcohol (usually isopropanol) added to the water are very important to doing a good job.

lewm:

Absolutely no apology needed for posting an excellent link, all I said was that it was referenced from the other link.. Given my interest, I had seen it before, but have to agree that Justin Time's "water thread" is one of the best threads ever on the subject of pure water for record cleaning, really detailed information!

I feel I should apologize if some of my posts have a commercial tint to them, I'm sure I'm guilty of being over-enthusiastic in wanting everyone to experience how good ultrasonic record cleaning results can be! 

You are lucky to have access to free lab water, and no doubt powerful microscopes so you could look closely at record grooves before and after cleaning! I have a 220x Dinolite USB scope, it's not powerful enough for looking really closely at record groove walls, but can be useful for looking at general cleanliness and seeing skips and damaged lands.

None of my cleaning processes use any alcohol. I know some people use it, and I purchased a bottle of 99.9% pure isopropyl ($18 from Amazon for 2 pints) to experiment with cleaning mixtures (on my own records). Yes it's effective, but there is divided opinion on the long term safety of using cleaners with alcohol on vinyl records, with concerns about how they might affect plasticizers. Ultrasonics are so effective (helped by a mild surfactant in the Audio Desk cleaning solution) that alcohol really isn't needed.

LOL about Recordgenius, my wife came up with the name Record Genie, inspired by our Diaper Genie, and the URL was available, so that was it!

I've still got some of my NERL water left over, so I may go back and do more testing (plus customer evaluation) in the Klaudio cleaners, and let's not forget that audiotomb has 5 gallons of NERL soon to arrive which he will hopefully report on!