Turntable noobie...what advice do you have?

Nice to hear from you again cleeds. How's the wife and kids?

No, pressing plants are not clean room and as I stated in a earlier post there is always some incidental dust on record and it varies a lot from almost nothing to painfully obvious. But, incidental dust can be brushed away with any good record brush. I use my sweep arm. The only problem with the sweep arm is when you lift it at the end of the record it will leave a little pile of dust in the runout area. I keep an Ortofon carbon brush handy to brush that away. As I have stated a million times there is no other environmental contamination that can be cleaned out of the grooves. Unfortunately, what happens I think is that the stampers become contaminated with dust so that by the end of the run they are stamping dust marks into the vinyl resulting in noisy records, then there is contaminated vinyl. I have tried over the years several times, in different ways including ultrasound to "clean" the noise away and it does not do anything. Since I only play records I purchased new and I use a sweep arm with a dust cover I hardly ever have to clean my stylus which is good because Lyra stylus cleaner is more expensive than gold.

I was just given a load of 78 rpm records so I have purchased a record cleaning machine. After studying the problem for 6 months I have ordered a Clearaudio Double Matrix Pro. Why? It uses fresh fluid for each cleaning and vacuums everything off the record leaving it bone dry and free of any contaminant. Air drying or blow drying are unacceptable. If you let distilled water dry on a flat dark surface you will see a residue. Distilled water is not contaminant free. the Pro cleans both sides at the same time and it is extremely well made. I will use it on a few noisy new records and see what happens. I will record a song to the computer both before and after cleaning to study the results. I have not had this capability before so this will be fun and informative. I hope you will enjoy seeing or hearing the results.  

Yes- to follow all the above advice, you will have to quit your job, get rid of your girlfriend and spend all of your time and money dealing with analog playback. This has happened here time and time again where the geezers here front-load a newbie with so much information that you’re afraid to play a record without endless rituals and equipment. I guarantee you that nobody here started out this way. Yes you do need a carbon-fiber brush and some stylus cleaner and a basic record cleaning machine is not a bad idea, but don’t go crazy in the beginning. You don’t even know if you like playing records yet. Take a breath. 

@charyo

+1

And start cheap. Just be aware that the sound can be improved by any and all of the above.

Find a retailer that can set up your turntable for you. Practice doing it yourself - on cheap equipment which, if broken, is more irritating than depressing.

Good luck, and enjoy!

@bdp24 , The dust bug was not conductive and it did not follow the grooves well. The arm I showed you above has a conductive carbon filament running down it's center. It neutralizes static beautifully. Because it's impedance is very low, a dead short actually, it will instantaneously discharge the entire surface on the record. Static travels over a surface rapidly. It will not turn corners and it will not travel through the record to the other side so you can have almost no static on one side and a huge charge on the other. Another interesting phenomena it the playing surface can have a negative charge and the label a positive one! Vinyl and paper are at opposite ends of the triboelectric series. The vinyl is pulling electrons from the paper which is happy to supply them!   This arm also follows the groove beautifully and given the price it is a no brainer. It's cheap and works way better than a Zerostat which in my opinion and, I have used one extensively, are garbage. They do work but the results are not near as good. I also feel silly using them. People look at you as weirdo. "Look at that guy squirting his records!"  You might as well pull out the wiener and pee on them. No really, the problem is that records pick up static very easily. you have to discharge the record while it is playing as @lewm correctly states above, if records ever have no charge it will only be momentary. 

Why don't you cough up 30 bucks and try one. Then tell us what you think and if you think it s-cks then so be it.  

I won’t participate in the endless and sometimes pointless debate about which cleaning method is best or especially about which static charge removal method is best, but I will say again that eliminating static charge and cleaning an LP are two entirely different subjects. Cleaning machines do not necessarily remove static charge. In fact in certain designs cleaning can enhance the static charge on the surface of an LP, although that is not usual. Mijo is correct in pointing out that removing or reducing the charge on the surface of the LP you happen to be playing does not necessarily remove charge from the entire LP. It has been shown that the charge simply migrates to the downside of the LP, enhancing the charge on that side. And I also agree with the most recent sentiment. If you are new to this part of the hobby, just go ahead and play records. You can worry about the rest of the stuff anytime later and forever more.