What do people place on their platter for dust protection


Just wanted to hit everyone up for some responses. I'm tired of worrying about taking my pristine VM cleaned vinyl on a platter thats been idle for a week. I have a TT in which a dustcover woukd be inpractable. I hadnt googled for it yet. I just wanted to ask here. Plus I'm recovering from surgery and have some extra time.
128x128blueranger
I have an old copy of Chuck Berry on Chess that looks like a cat fight took place on it.  Or an old jock strap that I ironed flat if I can't remember where Chuck is.....or just an old felt mat.
I place an ancient Asian silk cloth over my turntable when not in use. The cloth is lightly scented with the finest oils from China that have remarkable antistatic properties. And they smell great to boot! I use special silk gloves to remove the cloth from the turntable and place the cloth in an old burlap bag for temporary storage.
geoffkait,

I am sorry (for once), but I completely do not understand point of your last post.
File under I Did Not Know That : 47% of the Earth’s crust is oxygen (O2). Perhaps that accounts for why so many people have been dying recently, eh, glupson? Fortunately mice seem to be immune.
dweller,

I thought it must have been a slip as O2 and O3 are very different animals.

It makes me wonder (no relation to Stevie), if those ion generators do something to ozone (layer), should they be avoided for the benefit of human race? Just like CFC etc.

All the downsides would be offset by increase in economy due to higher sales of record-cleaning machines.
geoffkait,

I doubt oxygen is carcinogenic. It is toxic on some other levels, but that is a different topic (think of Stevie Wonder and similar issues). I just noticed that dweller mentioned O2 while you were responding about O3, including about possible carcinogenic effects of it. That is all. I suspect that dweller’s/Harry Pearson’s point was also O3, but I thought I would ask. It has nothing to do with dust covers, no matter how hard we try to make it all very smart, but once it is discussed why not clarify.
Ozone is the short-lived gas molecule O3, whereas oxygen is O2. O3 is an allotrope of oxygen and is produced by ionization of air, not emitted by ion generators. Air obviously is also composed of Nitrogen gas and other gases.
HP was referring to whatever comes out of a negative ion generator. You're right, it may be some other "O"...
glupson, do you think oxygen is carcinogenic? Wouldn’t that be a kick in the yarbles?
"Just a good memory -article from the 1990’s (HP specifically mentioned the "O2" emissions linked to cancer.)."


dweller,

Do you remember if that was really about O2 or maybe about ozone (O3)? Maybe, that is the misunderstanding part. geoffkait’s response was regarding ozone, not O2.
I found my old graphite mat to use. I placed it  on top of my Herbies way excellent mat and the detail was turned up too much to being harsh. I remember as before. I have a made loaded TT with an aluminum platter and softer mats work best
Rats and People have not (rpt not) been dropping dead because of ozone exposure or using negative ion air purifiers or using negative ion space gun blasters like the ones I sell. People like you and Harry are easily alarmed.
 😦 
"It was concluded that ozone is not a lung carcinogen in strain A/J mice at those exposure levels. Moreover, this mouse strain appears to be particularly resistant towards chronic ozone toxicity."

It has nothing to do with covering the turntable mat, but as Harry Pearson was quoted and he has no means of explaining what he meant, it may be fair to emphasize a few things. The study may be correct only for those mice and for those exposure levels. It also mentions that the strain of mice may be particularly resistant towards unwanted ozone action. Both of those statements leave the possibility open that Harry Pearson was correct when talking about humans and/or longer exposure.


Interestingly enough, quick search on PubMed does not yield any recent work on ozone and cancer. All we seem to have is one study done twenty years ago in mice that appeared to be particularly resistant to begin with.


I suggest that "carcinogenic tendency of ozone" debate in the thread about covering the turntable mat ends with no clear winner.

Uh, oh, it looks like our friendly non-audiophile tweak hater has another thing for his pseudo skeptic’s toolbox.

Laugh it a bit, give it a try
If I’m not impressed
You can still cry 😢

Positive ions, in excess, may not be good for your health, but neither will negative be. It is all about balance and your body tries hard to maintain it. As far as impact on sound goes, these explanations are fun to read.
Please cut me some slack. I’m afraid the real answer is probably over Alan’s head. It’s not really a physics explanation, if you get my drift. Feel free to pm me.

“If I could explain it to the average person they wouldn’t have given me the Nobel prize.” - Richard Feynman 
@geoffkait ,

Oh, and yes, what you say about the forms of energies above being photons, I should likely stand corrected. But, what I think Alan is dealing with here is how all these things are interacting together in the home environment...the hows, whens, wheres and under what conditions - that may be where Alan is rewriting the book AFA AV-performance/longterm-health is concerned.
@geoffkait ,

Asked Alan if he had a simple, direct answer as to why he says that positive ions affect AV quality. Alan has dealt with that topic, at least indirectly, with those of us in his facebook group before, but I'd never seen where he'd boiled any of that down to a single idea. As I was afraid of, he said it was a very complex answer. He did give me a quick rundown of identifying the main topics involved and then stopped and asked if that was enough or if he should go on. I said no, that that was sufficient, even though it was clear from the technical nature of what he describing that a much more informed background in physics on my part would better help me understand the details and that I'm not nearly qualified to factually verify it. 

Geoff, if you just have to know what he said, you can pm me, but when I told him I was asking to use the answer in a forum, he demured on allowing it in this case since he felt that no one would understand the science and he was of the opinion that any arguments along those lines it might produce would likely be bad for business anyway, so if you did pm me about it I would hope you would respect his wishes as I do. Been dealing with him the past 8 yrs and he's never done anything to me except to do me right...I have no reason to go against that.
If you don't have an old lp to use, cut out a 12" diameter circle out of cardboard or paper.
That was probably an ozone scare. Hope it’s not (rpt not) O2 that’s the problem. 😛 Here’s an update from NIH,

oxicol Sci. 1999 Dec;52(2):162-7.
Ozone carcinogenesis revisited.

Witschi H1, Espiritu I, Pinkerton KE, Murphy K, Maronpot RR.
Author information
Abstract
The question was asked whether ozone would act as a lung carcinogen in mice. To test the hypothesis, female strain A/J mice were exposed for 6 h/day, 5 days/week to 0.12 ppm, 0.5 ppm, or 1.0 ppm of ozone; control animals were kept in filtered air. No ozone-related deaths were observed at any time during the experiment. After 5 months, one-third of the animals were killed. The remaining animals were split into two groups: exposure to ozone continued for one group, whereas the other group was transferred into filtered air. Four months later, these animals were killed. No significant increase in lung tumor multiplicity (average number of tumors per lung) or lung tumor incidence (percentage of tumor-bearing animals) was found in the animals exposed to ozone when compared to animals kept in filtered air, regardless of ozone concentration. Morphometric analysis of lungs of animals exposed to the highest ozone concentration (1.0 ppm) showed a small, statistically not significant increase in centriacinar lesions. It was concluded that ozone is not a lung carcinogen in strain A/J mice at those exposure levels. Moreover, this mouse strain appears to be particularly resistant towards chronic ozone toxicity.

Just a good memory -article from the 1990's (HP specifically mentioned the "O2" emissions linked to cancer.).
dweller
Harry Pearson (Founder - The Abso!ute Sound) also mentioned the hazards of negative ions...

>>>>Really? Got a link? Quote? Anything?
Just to cut to the chase a little bit radio frequency noise is not (rpt not) negative ions. It’s not any kind of ions. It’s photons, like anything else in the electromagnetic spectrum. All radio frequencies, colors, x rays, Gamma rays, things of that nature, are photons.
Harry Pearson (Founder - The Abso!ute Sound) also mentioned the hazards of negative ions...
@geoffkait 

I do know that virtually all types of environmental electrical noise like EMR, EMI, etc (whether produced by AV gear or other sources) are positively charged ions. Even heat given off from a transformer is a form of EMR. Ever go into a teenagers room/hideout after they've been at it for a while gaming, with the TV on, music playing, wireless headphones, cellphones, etc, etc and the first thing that hits you as you open the door is not only the heat, but the totally stuffy air quality in the room? It's not really the kids themselves using up the O2, it's all the active gear. Even in a room that has air vents in it like the rest of the house, this room will be much worse because of all the stray voltage in it (particularly if this room has the router in it and it's 5G or more) and the vast bulk of that stray voltage is in the form of positive ions. The overwhelming amounts of positive ions are what is physically displacing the O2 in the room.

Negative ions are good here because they can cancel out the positive ions (ionic cancellation) and a one for one cancellation would be best. 

Prolonged low O2 levels have been implicated in a vast range of medical conditions and diseases, including cancer, going back to the 1930's. Ions (positive or negative) can be ingested, inhaled, can be both absorbed and released through the skin or they can pass straight through your body. If excess positive ions can displace O2 in the room, they can and will also do the same thing in your body. Not the best thing, long term. 

But, aside from some health benefits, it turns out that ionic cancellation is a great way to improve AV performance as well. IF you have a way to generate the negative ions...and the right kind of them..

Negative ions come in only 2 flavors of molecule size: large or small. The large ones tend to be man-made (air cleaners), because they are easier to make in terms of the physics behind it. Unfortunately, the body cannot utilize large neg ions. The small ones can react in either the body or in the environment to form O2 or, once in a while, an H2O molecule. Small neg ions are made in nature all the time, like when standing under a waterfall while the friction of the falling water droplets through the air generates lots of O2. 

The only products for AV gear I know of that offer ionic cancellation (and that produce small neg ions) are made by Alan Maher Designs. I have tried a lot of AMD stuff over the years and have found it all to be amazingly transformational to sound and performance, to video, too. That it presents a healthier living environment at the same time, to me, is a nice byproduct.

I'll see if I can't answer your pop quiz a little more directly later on, if I can both distill what I believe what I may already know and also after I have a better chance to verify it for myself, to be sure. And I just may run that Q by Alan and see what he will say about it, too. It's a good Q.
Wouldn’t ion type purifiers be good for the sound? That’s why deionizers and anti static devices work on CDs, LPs, cables and such - they bombard the things with a stream of negative ions.

Pop quiz - why is Positive charge bad for the sound? 
The "air purifier" would need to be just an air 'filter'. Purifiers work by releasing negative ions that are attracted to impurities in the air which are all of a positive charge. That has the effect of making the particulants "heavier than air" and they settle out. Voila: clean air. Dirty floors and surfaces, yes, but clean air.

But, I think if it were me, I'd just throw an old pizza box lid over the tt and call it a day.
An old 1960’s comedy record works for me.  No plans on ever playing it again.
@geoffkait But if you switch off the purifier to listen, some cells escape and land.
I use a Michell Engineering GyroDec (full plinth version, not the SE) and always keep the lid closed when not in use or playing an LP. I have no problems with dust accumulation on the platter. I just dust the lid about once a month.
Whatever happened to air purifiers? However many it takes. There’s no reason to have dust in the room to begin with. 
One of those speedmats.  Carbon fiber I think.  Works well as a dust protector.  
Use a microfiber cloth for a quick cleaning before playing an album 

good listening

Peter
Dustcover would be my preferred option but since it isn't available in this case, why not just slip another platter mat on top of the one you're using.  Then take it off next listening session.
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Clean the platter with a damp lint-free cloth before a listening session.  And let the platter dry before placing a record on it.
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Or even better still an unused single sided record 🤓 in my case one of the Classic 45rpm Milhaud set

or of course one of these if you want to spend $

https://www.sleevecityusa.com/Turntable-platter-Polycover-p/gem-polycover.htm