Getting and keeping records clean................

With the Art of Sound, does one need to have a distilled water rinse?

Has anyone had the experience, with hand cleaning, of having the stylus becoming the final cleaner and eventually totally gunking up. I had to change cartridges-very expensive.

A VPI 16.5 is a must. It's up to you as to what fluid you use. I like the Disc Doctor. I've heard Record Research Labs is good. Also look into LAST record prservative. It's appled after you clean and dry your records. It chemically binds to the vinyl and prevents you stylus from gauging chunks of vinyl out of the record grooves. It's not cheap, but a must have. I've played records hunders of times with no wear, clicks, or pop. Also look into Stylast. You apply you've cleaned your stylus. Your stlylus gets super hot due to friction, in fact it momenralty mealts the groves as if goes by. Stylast prevents this. But you must be carefull you apply it to the stylus only. You don't want it travelling up the cantilever and gunk up thr works. Check out Last, Disc Doctor, RRL, the Zerodust sylus cleaner on the web. Good luck

Threads on record cleaning are always interesting. The topic is almost a religion and can draw heated debate. I think as much as any topic in audio, it illustrates how little hard data we have to make decisions with. We each try one or two or maybe even four alternatives. The outcome is so subjective. Maybe that's the way it is with most things.

Myself, I belong to the church of DIY. Gutted a Goodwill t-table, use the platter to spin the disc with a DIY cleaner of expensive water and alcohol and a dash of something or other (surfactant). Dry brush, wet it and scrub it, vaccum it with an old canister vac and crevice tool padded with velvet. I might make it into one box, but haven't yet.

The records usually sound better - more open, but sometimes more poppy - I guess I pull the dirt out of the pits in the groove. I think I am getting the records completely dry. Who knows if much residual liquid is left.

Why? Because I like the ritual. And liking the ritual, I think it makes it sound better, even when it doesn't.

I finally took the advice of the experts & bought a new VPI 16.5 RCM this afternoon from my local VPI dealer. He showed me how to use it properly & tomorrow I should be cleaning some of my collection & putting the records in new clean sleeves. I am really looking forward to hearing them once properly cleaned. Thanks for the help as always.