if I buy an ultrasonic cleaner for my records will I be able to hear the difference?

@prof 

IME, you can't judge record cleanliness by appearance. All my records have appeared pristine since I bought a 16.5 back in the Precambrian.

Five years ago I bought a lab grade German US machine and ran it at 80 KHz. After cleaning and rinsing, the records look the same - pristine. But grunge collects on the bottom of the US tank, indicating just how much further there was to go - I would say about 80%, meaning the 16.5 was good for maybe 20% of the deep crud. The sound of the records gives a similar impression.

To come clean, these are just crude subjective guesstimates, not measurements. Also, you may not get what you pay for when you buy a US machine. High frequency, high power, hot chemistry, proper spacing, and a machine that actually meets its specs all make a difference. Quality costs, here as elsewhere - but bang for buck is very, very high.

At Degritter site you can hear the comparison before cleaned and cleaned record.

Although the recording is not particularly good you can still hear that on the non cleaned one you have focused presentation, with piano, vocal, accordion and violins have their own space in the venue.
On the cleaned recording nothing is anymore from one piece. Instruments are out of focus, transferred to left or right, vocal became big and hollow for the same reason. Everything is in your face. It seems cleaner, but you loose the event hologram. Something that happens when you go from Decca to London.
 If you have very high resolution system everything is more obvious and you can clearly hear what US cleaning does to the records.

A.

Gosh Alceta,
if I read you right you are saying Ultrasonic cleaning makes things worse and the better the playback system the worse it will sound. Am I right ??

"transferred to left or right"

From this statement alone I call BS

Good Listening

Peter

My experience has been that a noisy record will remain a noisy record with an RCM, Ultrasonic, or any combo thereof.

I’ve taken problematic samples to my local B&M audio store with an ultrasonic cleaner with detergent bath and air blow dry cycles.  Despite multiple attempts at home on my RCM - some records just remained noisy.  So I was hopeful that an ultrasonic cleaning would be the answer.

Twice thru and all the ticks and pops were in the exact same spots.

I’ve sent the same problematic samples (8 records) to a company that specializes in multi-step cleaning/archiving services for vinyl LPs. I carefully played and noted surface noise problems before sending and unfortunately, after return, the surface noise remained. Perhaps the sonics were improved a bit, but ultrasonic cleaning will not be a magic cure for ticks and pops.