Stylus Cleaning Rituals

I choose among the various stylus brushes that dwell on the turntable shelf. Normally, I’ll use either of my two stiff brushes. If there’s just a single hair festooned to the stylus I’ll brush it away with a slender, very gentle watercolor paint brush. If I truly hear grunginess as I listen I’ll juice my Professional Electronic Stylus Cleaner with a drop of Stylast System Formula 4, put the machine onto the platter, turn it on, lower the needle onto the machine with the tonearm cuing lever and let it buzz for a couple seconds.

I was using Stylast but after when I cleaned with Blu Tak there was
always a lot of black on the Blu Tak. I switched to the Lyra stuff &
now no black junk. 

A friend has been through multiple methods and is a advocate of the use of Jewelry Putty.
         

@millercarbon, might you be willing to describe your Zerostat routine? Every source seems to say something different.

The Zerostat is nothing more than a piezoelectric crystal that generates an ion stream off of the pointy needle inside the end of the gun. Squeeze and ions stream, release and cations stream. The trick is to squeeze and release slow and gradual. If it clicks going either way you are going too fast. 

It is not a huge amount either way, and it is not very effective, nor does it last very long. To me it mostly is a ritual. Although occasionally some speck of dust is on there, the Zerostat will be enough to let you blow it off.

Anyway, I put the record on, clamp it down, start it spinning and then squeeze from outside to inside, release from inside to outside, done. Whole thing is maybe 5 seconds.  

Another one of these things people can obsess over, worrying about how it is used, when really it is dealing with static electricity. Something that changes from day to day and record to record and probably a lot of the time whatever benefit you got is erased by new charges being generated while the record is playing. Not something I would spend any time worrying about. Not even something I would buy, if I didn't already have one.

I clean all incoming records with 1) Last Power Cleaner, then 2) my VPI vacuum record cleaner and treat with Last Preservative. Typically I will listen to it once or twice before putting into my collection of over 2,000 albums. I listen to about one album a day. I listen to streaming most of the time so it is years between plays. Consequently I seldom do any cleaning of my stylus... maybe pull the dishwasher stylus brush towards myself a couple times every six or eight months.

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I long ago threw away the Zerostat Guns, as I find it useless. For me, life is too short to waste time on avoidable nonsense. I saw a great electron microscopic video of a stylus following the grooves of an album. Looked as if the stuff collecting on the stylus was about an angstrom thick and would in no way impact the sound... and would fall off. I use the brush to get any hair or fuzz that may get caught.