Options for ridding records of static electricity


I am getting back into vinyl, listening to “garage sale” finds and also new albums that I have been picking up. I have a nice old Linn Sondek LP12 with the felt mat. Every time I go to remove a record from the spindle or flip the record, static electricity grabs the felt mat and it sticks like a magnet. I have to very carefully flip the felt mat at the corner with my finger but one of these times I’m going to slip and smudge or scratch a record. 

I’ve seen the “Milty Zerostat” and seem to remember this product from back in the day. I see that it is still made and there is one eBay vendor that has them for $77. Is this my best bet? I thought Michael Fremor talked about these in one of his videos. 

Are there other products I should look at to reduce static electricity on my records? Thanks for any help you can give.
masi61
With subwoofers you won't need the bass transformer. I plan on bypassing those controls also. I use full range digital "room control" which is really speaker control. I can make the speakers do whatever I want in the digital domain where there is much less distortion. Use subs and you will increase your headroom by 10dB and noticably lower distortion in your 845's. 
This is not very scientific but hey neither was the Kite. I can only tell if there is a charge there or not. I can't measure it. It is a qualitative test and the most sencitive I have available to me. Everybody is going to laugh at me now. When charging the record to see if I could measure anything with my meter I noticed that the charged record had a strong attraction to the hair on the back of my fingers so strong that I could feel it. Testing with multiple levels of charge it became obvious that the attraction to my hair was more sencitive than the attraction to the paper sleeve. All I have to do is move the back of my hand close to the record and I can see the hair flexing towards the record. With no charge the hair does not move at all. With a highly charged record the hairs stand at full attention. 
Anybody with hair fingers can try it at home. You could also borrow a gorilla from the zoo. 
The baseline was set by running the grounded brush over both sides of the record shorting it out. Hair does not move. At the end I held a finger over the record, no attraction at all. I took the record off the turntable and checked it again. Still no attraction. I rubbed the record with the paper sleeve and hairs stood straight up. Tonight I will short out the record again, play a side without the brush and and see if the record developes any charge. By the way and interestingly, holding the record does not dissipate the charge. Pulling a record out of a paper sleeve does not create a measurable charge at 54% humidity. Rubbing the record firmly with the paper sleeve 10 times back and forth creates a sizable charge pulling the hair straight. I don't have an anti static brush to test but my guess is just holding it over the record will not work well. They should make these brushes with a connection to ground. Then they would work great.
Antinn, I also have absolutely no static issues But I am going to have to stop telling people that the stylus rubbing the groove is the cause of statuc build up if it is not true. Something is causing static build up and there does not seem to any unity as to the cause but there certainly is one. We are certainly in agreement as to rice paper sleeves and filters. Both my air handlers have high efficiency filters and it helps. I have to wipe off my dust cover once every other month instead of every other week or so. It would be really nice to put your turntable in a clean room.
You could make one in your house. God knows what it would cost. 
Almost all of my records are in rice paper sleeves now. Paper sleeve are certainly the worst. But I do not think they cause static in normal use. 
Records can hold on to a static charge indefinitely and paper sleeves will stick to a charged record making the problem rather obvious. Rice paper sleeves will not. 
Anyway, I know what I do works and is very efficient. We shall see if I can define the problem better. 
Mijo, You wrote, "With subwoofers you won't need the bass transformer."  Since you did not hear my speakers without the bass transformer, how can you possibly know that?  First of all, with the single full range transformer, the deficiency was at frequencies well above those of a subwoofer supplement.  More like in the 50 to 300Hz range and very noticeable.  I am not going to mate an ESL with a dynamic woofer (not subwoofer) that has to do significant work up to ~300Hz.  With the added bass transformer in parallel, now I get full range ESL bass that goes down to about 30Hz and gradually tails off below that, due to the huge physical size of an 845PX panel.  I'd rather have very low distortion ESL bass than bass that needs augmentation with a dynamic woofer (not a subwoofer when used above 80Hz or so, IMO), but that's me.
I was inspired by this posting I read here about a DIY anti-static solution. I’ve been running my version for just over a month now. I can confirm that LPs are lifting off the platter without static crackles now, and that they are sliding back into their sleeves much easier than they come out. I am not going so far as to say that every single trace of static is completely gone after a single play, but I will say that after playing each side of an LP there is less static in the disc than before playing it. We’ve got two turntables running in the house, and the static solution is only set up on one of them. Static builds on the turntable with out the solution, and dissipates on the one where I have the brush running. It is a very nice feeling to lift a disc off the platter and have it feel like inert plastic versus some kind of active static monster.

The solution isn’t novel or particularly innovative, it’s a DIY scaled down version of solutions that are working daily in factories everywhere. You need a conductive carbon brush with an anchor point for a grounding wire, and you need to make sure that grounding wire makes it to an earth point. I’m using the panel screw on the wall plate (after I verified that the screw was indeed grounded using a multi-meter).

Link to image: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bYY2Gjrmj_P-l2kgWdtM-h3eozBEELUwmKtKsp9e8cOsZzgoPFhyZZSp0z1eUlTDJq...

The toughest part for me was sourcing a good quality conductive carbon fiber brush at a reasonable price. If you are blessed to have old computer printers laying about you might be able to disassemble one and cannibalize the brush that most printers have built in. I ended up ordering my brush from Amstat Industries. Four inches was the smallest size I could order and cost was twenty four dollars for the brush and twelve for shipping for a total of thirty-six dollars for the brush to my door. I know that in the UK there are similar manufacturers of anti-static brushes one could source.

This DIY version has a good number of conductive carbon bristles in play across a large surface area, and I can have it making direct contact with both sides of the LP at the edge - or I can back it off to keep it silent at a 1-2 mm gap distance.

Thanks for reading. Hope this helps someone.
dcarwin, As mentioned somewhere up the thread, Audioquest now make their well known carbon fiber record brush with a metal handle that is electrically continuous with the brush fibers.  (Earlier versions did not establish contact between fibers and handle.) When you hold it whilst brushing the LP, your body provides the electrical pathway to ground via your feet or you can just touch your metal equipment stand, in case your feet are insulated from ground by rubber shoes or nonconductive carpet.  I also own, but have never used, a Mapleshade brush that has a ground wire with a clip at the end, also to fasten to a grounded object.  Problem is its fibers are of natural origin and they both encourage static charge and also lose bristles which can foul up a stylus.  This latter is why I don't use it.