What is the best way to clean Vinyl?

"Best"? I’m not sure there is such a thing. Apart from budget, there’s the time and effort factor, the condition of the records (I buy older copies 10/1 over new) and your ability to evaluate results meaningfully.

My "best" results come from a combination of manual cleaning, vacuum on a big Monks and and additional step into a KL ultrasonic machine. Not a cheap point of entry.

Tima did a very good job taking on the challenge of a high end version of DIY after buying a cheap Chinese US bath and advanced to an Elma, filtering and other improvements. His objective wasn’t to do it on the "cheap" (though there are plenty of cheap ultrasonic machines out there) but to achieve best results (I think Tima had and may still have a Loricraft, which is similar to the Monks in overall design).

Neil Antin’s "book" on Precision Aqueous Cleaning of Vinyl Records is an encyclopedic reference that combines materials science, chemistry and other disciplines. It is not an easy or "light" read but Neil’s knowledge and willingness to answer questions is unparalleled in my experience.

I was honored to publish the first several installments of both Tima’s work and Neil’s, now in its Third Edition. The funny thing is, those two got together and exchanged some ideas which are captured on the thread from What’s Best that @mikelavigne  posted upthread, so that is as good a place to start as any.

@jtimothya  @antinn 

I started out with the Pro Jet and found it to be very labor intensive. It did a great job but if I had several records to clean, I was there standing for a long time. I finally got the Klaudio and just slip the record into the machine and come back later and it is clean and dry. 

Here we go again with the cleaning fetish.  Last iteration was only a month or two back.

Once again, I say I rarely hear surface noise on my records.  If I do, I clean on my Nitty Gritty I have had for 40+ years now.  Then I put the disc in a new Nagaoka inner, so I know it's been cleaned.  I have cleaned perhaps 15-20% of my 4,000 odd collection, judging by the number of new sleeves I have bought..  I can only recollect VERY few times I have heard noise again on a record I have cleaned, so re-cleaning is very rare.

So.  How much noise do people hear?

It might be suggested that failing to clean a record before playing it allows deposits to cause wear on the LP in play (or on the stylus).  Well, with some discs in my collection 60+ years I have not heard this.  Nor do my stylii wear prematurely; indeed with my parallel tracking arm running typically at 2.5g (a bit less for the van den Huls) they mostly outlast constructor's life estimates.

There are those here who clean every record before play.  I regard this as truly obsessive behaviour, but I wonder if repeated cleaning (especially wet cleaning and brush/pad contact cleaning) causes damage?

My budget is $500.

FYI

I've had a DeGritter for the past few years, and it's worked perfectly for my hundreds of albums. And I do clean each new record I get as there's always some kind of stuff from the pressing plant that didn't get completely removed.