RECORD DOCTOR VI RECORD CLEANING MACHINE

Cleanliness not only get you closer to Godliness, it also improves the sound quality of your LPs and extends the life of your phono stylus.

A black dust cover, similar to an inverted reusable shopping bag, is another useful addition for the new VI edition.

It’s ironic that a product designed ultimately to reduce noise levels should increase them so significantly during its operation. One of the upgrades advertised for the ‘VI’ version is that it runs “cooler and quieter” than its predecessors—but the suction system nevertheless makes quite the hum. With a bathe-and-wipe cleaning solution you might spend a Sunday afternoon cleaning vinyl in the family room. Doing so with the RD-VI would be more akin to operating a hairdryer while the missus is trying to watch telly. Neither can you listen uninterrupted to vinyl while cleaning your vinyl, given the regular bursts of suction motor noise. So the cleaning task can perhaps instead be considered as foreplay to your listening enjoyment.

It wasn’t so loud that it persuaded me to wear headphones while operating it, though for long cleaning sessions you might consider it, as might anyone else in the vicinity.

Noisiness aside, it’s great fun to operate the Record Doctor. It’s too low to have on the floor without back-bending, and too high to have on a table without the need to reach above it; it was ideal on a calf-high stool, operated from a knee-high stool.

It took only a couple of records to master the amount of fluid required to fully coat the disc—the fluid bottle has a pull-down nozzle which helps eject only a drop or two at a time. Spreading becomes a combination of turning the record and moving the supplied brush. Indeed the spreading brush would seem to be the main thing to get saturated and potentially dirty on the Record Doctor, running damply around the unclean records as it does, so picking up their superficial accumulation of dirt while the liquid and suction does the deeper clean. I introduced two additional stages to the process, giving each disc an initial dry wipe with a non-shedding cloth to clear any excessive dust before placing it on the Record Doctor, and also giving the spreading brush a cleansing swipe each time prior to application, to ensure I wasn’t transferring any dirt collected from the previous disc.

After flipping the disc you get to turn on that noisy motor and manually turn the record around quite slowly. You can’t, of course, see how well it’s sucking and whether it’s yet dry underneath; the instructions suggest two or three rotations, which takes something like 15 to 20 seconds. One advantage of this system is that records are immediately dry and ready to return to their sleeves or, indeed, play, subject to interruption by the next bout of suction noise.

With dunk-and-wipe cleaning systems you’re never entirely sure things are fully dry, especially with cloths getting increasingly damp as you progress through a batch. With some systems you actually have to leave records out to dry, like plates in a drying rack. Here every disc gets the same treatment, and they all emerge dry and ready for use or for storage.

Depending on the level of fluid application, the supplied 125mL bottle of RxLP cleaning fluid is expected to clean 25 to 50 LPs, but it’s reassuring to see that you’re not gouged for ongoing fluid purchases, since you can get a large bottle of concentrate for $44 which will dilute to make

3.8 litres of fluid, enough to clean more than 1,000 LPs (and even more singles).

I saved some reference discs until I had mastered the cleaning process and become fully accustomed to the RD-IV’s ways. And by ‘reference’, I do not mean the finest pressings in my collection but rather a range selected as suitable candidates for ‘before and after’ comparisons. These comparisons were made not only by listening, to see if pops, surface noise and any other distortion were reduced, but also by digitising the playback before and after cleaning so I could examine the sound visually, albeit at second (and digitised) hand. Those waveforms are reproduced (overleaf) with the original shown in red and the cleaned version in green.

I chose two LP acquisitions from the last local pre-Covid record fair to clean: one an LP of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Concert in Central Park’ which was in poor condition with significant splotches visible when angled to the light, the other a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, apparently in reasonable condition. I also pulled out one of my most-played pieces of vinyl, Keith Jarrett’s ‘Changes’, on which the first side’s Flying pt1 has good minimal areas in which changes in surface noise might be more easily assessed than, say, with thrash metal.

My fourth test disc was a near-pristine white label pressing of Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ from Absolute Analogue (not one of the most highly-regarded pressings of this album, sadly).

As expected, there was little difference to be discerned with this last disc in terms of surface noise, this being kept pristine and regularly cleaned before play. The waveforms, however, showed that even here persistent clicks could be reduced, with some indication that surface noise was also reduced (the sample shown is part of the gap on side one between Freddie Freeloader and Blue In Green).

There were improvements on the Jarrett

LP, too, though not sufficient to wash the sound entirely clean. Audibly it was the Fleetwood Mac disc which had the greatest removal of vinyl noise, rescuing this $2 acquisition to earn a place in the record racks instead of ending up a probable reject ready for the eager hands of the next local street clean-up.

The marks on the Simon & Garfunkel disc were too stubborn to be entirely removed even after a second more intense clean.

The effect on sound was nevertheless substantial—unlistenably dirty before, the disc was still noisy afterwards but to an extent where I could easily enough listen through the noise and now enjoy the album.

The comparison waveforms, which are from the fade up of the crowd at the beginning, show a significant removal of the transient cracks where dirt has been displaced.

When I mentioned to Decibel Hi-Fi that I was looking forward to cleaning some of the many singles in my collection, they said they would include the required adaptor for these, admitting “it’s just a bit of hose”.

And it is indeed just a bit of hose, split down the side to open it up. After a bit of thought, and a seven-inch disc in place for guidance, this seemed designed to cover the bit of the vacuum outlet slot which remains uncovered by the smaller disc, thereby maintaining maximum suction pressure on the underside of the 45. It was precision cut for this purpose! And worked well. I cleaned some Bowie singles, including a promo copy of his debut Rubber Band for Deram Records in 1966 (the label marked with a ‘x’ indicating that my father rejected it for possible airplay), and also an appropriate choice for an audio magazine, the Sound And Vision single from RCA in 1977. Both gained (or rather lost) audibly from the Record Doctor VI cleaning with some reduction of clicks, especially in the lead-in of the Deram single.

Records must be cleaned. The latest Record Doctor VI proved an effective and enjoyable way of doing so, more than commensurate with its price compared with cheaper wash-and-wipe systems. It can’t resurrect deeply abused vinyl, but it can significantly improve many discs which might otherwise be unlistenably dirty, and will most certainly maintain the most treasured discs of a collection in the condition they deserve to be played. Jez Ford