I accumulated a lot of records over the decades; stuff I bought when I was an "audiophile," and even more when vinyl was proclaimed "dead"- Tower had moved all the LPs to the annex at the Lower Broadway store and I used to come out with bags full- shopping bags of stuff. A lot were treated as "cut outs" but I also bought at Princeton, Academy and in the last couple decades, started to seriously collect --albums from heavy psych to "free jazz," often used, attended record shows, bought a few collections, and got to know a few vinyl collectors.
I had been using a VPI since the early ’80s--a 16 that was converted to a 16.5 and experimented with different methods as a dug down-- some of the used records were contaminated and when I bought my first US machine, an Audio Desk, it was not entirely effective in cleaning some of these used records. That forced me to go back to manual cleaning and vacuum used together with US. I eventually moved away from the AD to the KL machine, which does not use chemistry.
My non-scientific take: a lot of these "used" records suffered from noise and contamination because of bad "cleanings"--I’ve seen guys at shows wipe records with mystery sprays and cloth. I suspect some of the LPs that I was able to revive were casualties of bad prior cleanings, rather than kludgey tone arms on changers which caused groove chew. (I was focusing on a lot of late ’60s and early ’70s LPs, which took us into the oil crisis and a real low point in vinyl pressing quality due to the compounds, including regrind).
Disclaimer: I publish TheVinylPress where that book by Neil Antin (@antinn) was published. I credit Neil with all the heavy lifting, the science and pulling it all together since he wrote the Mil-Spec for cleaning life critical systems on our naval fleet and is himself an audiophile who wanted to apply his life’s work to another of his passions-- music and recordings.
It isn’t a light read, but more of a reference. There are any number of ways to effectively clean a record. Neil’s starting premise is that you don’t need thousands of dollars in record cleaning equipment to get records clean in a measurable, repeatable way. I’m far from a guru, I got to where I was through what I would call amateur experimentation. I do use very high quality equipment, having cleaned thousands of records.
As others have pointed out, the "spray and wipe" will not get the contamination out of the grooves- but probably only add to it. Some folks like the simple convenience of US made for LP cleaning--which involves the least labor. I’m somewhere in the middle--I still manually clean using a good commercial fluid and vac using a big Monks, then pop the record into the KL US. If the record is new and does not have apparent contamination, including fingerprints, I can rely solely on US, but since my thing is older copies, those usually go through a multi-stage, multi-method process.
Once clean, I rarely have to re-clean. I follow a protocol of new inner sleeve, jacket cover and keep the original inner if it has any artifact value.
There’s a ton of material out there, in writing and on video, about record cleaning.
Neil has done something that no one author has done- to assemble in a logical way, the steps involved in cleaning and why those steps are important, taking into account chemistry as well as materials science. For that, I thank him.
Bill Hart
