RECORD CLEANERS COMPARED
Stephen Dawson compares four different systems for cleaning LP records, one of them all-Australian and one of them super high-tech!
Stephen Dawson tests four different systems for cleaning LP records, one of them all-Australian and one of them super high-tech!
Icame into hi-fi in the early 1970s, right at the peak of quadraphonic sound. Vinyl was the only way to listen to music recordings with quality (except for those lucky few with access to a reel-to-reel tape machine). But it was often a depressing scene. A new record, straight from the shop, often suffered from surface noise. Sometimes noise just seemed to appear magically on a record despite one’s greatest care.
This was at a time when I’d earn a little over six dollars a week for eight hours work, and an LP cost around six dollars. As I said, depressing. When digital rolled around a decade later, I was one of the first to roll up with $1,200 1984 dollars in hand to buy a Sony CDP-101. Say what you like about digital sound quality, it’s devoid of clicks and pops and play-by-play degradation.
Unfortunately, I then embarked on what I called my Great Vinyl Replacement Project. That involved buying the CD version of all my albums. That wasn’t a bad idea. The unfortunate part was that I then felt able to
trade in the vinyl versions. Young family, not much money and all that.
Still, I retain quite a few records from those days. And nostalgia and curiosity (and the opportunity to review a couple of turntables) has had me delving into the glories and disasters of vinyl again in recent years.
At first I was hopeful. Most new albums that you can buy these days—and re-issues of old albums—come on heavier-duty vinyl than in the past, and since a proportionately larger part of the market are likely to be audio enthusiasts, I figured that that all new LPs would be premium products, beautifully and carefully produced.
Certainly the covers look that way. But the vinyl? The very first new album I played had some very nasty, very loud pops on one track. Another brand new album made the stylus skip on the first track. Closer inspection revealed that what looked like a fibre on the surface was actually a thread of glue. Fortunately it dislodged when I worked on it with a stylus brush. There turned out to be similar defects on all four sides.
Not all that much had changed, it seems, these past four decades. So, what to do? Perhaps a bit of cleaning could help. Fashions in cleaning vinyl have swung this way and that over the decades. Back before I got into hi-fi, our family three-in-one had a ‘dust bug’. Remember those? That kept some of the dust and dirt out, but couldn’t do anything to protect the vinyl from the 10 gram tracking weight of the ceramic stylus.
Once I bought my own better-quality equipment, I went with a DiscWasher and three or four drops of cleaning fluid for each play. The DiscWasher was a cleaning brush with the fibres intended to go into the groove, pointing against the direction of motion. Later I moved to a carbon fibre brush, which of course you use dry. But all that was for maintenance.
What do to about noise already built up? Was it damage to the groove? Ingrained dirt? Could I fix the noise in my records?
How could you clean them? In my youth various theories about record cleaning swirled around the hi-fi community. ‘Yes’ said some. ‘No’ said others. ‘If you make your LPs damp, then they’ll be attacked by fungus and truly become damaged.’ ‘Fooey!’,said others. So I just stuck with my modest, pre-play cleaning ritual.
But now, after a few decades of mostly digital media listening, I am strangely more
tolerant of LP noise, although still desirous of removing it. I guess that a click or pop isn’t quite the disaster as it was when it affected a record that cost one a week’s full income.
So, with the approval of our editor, I decided to test some cleaning solutions. One dates from back in my youth. This is a simple cleaning solution bath and brush, conveniently designed for effective operation. The second is a record cleaning machine. The third is an Australian development, and it takes a very different approach. And the fourth is a high-tech device which uses ultrasound.
Limitations
Now, before we start cleaning let us understand a few things.
First, cleaning many not improve your records at all. When I started cleaning records, the results were distinctly disappointing. The little ticks and tocks characteristic of vinyl were still there afterwards. Along with always promptly returning albums to their sleeves, and always playing them with the turntable lid closed, it seemed that my record-playing hygiene had been effective. The noises in the grooves of those forty year old records were perhaps inherent in the pressing, or perhaps as a result of other damage. But they didn’t seem to be the result of dirt.
So I went searching for ‘new’ old records. I found some at an antique shop. I found some more at a second-hand record dealer.
And then I found the mother lode. My local recycler had four shelves of LPs, mostly classical, and they were cheap, so I bought a few dozen of them.
Second thing to understand: even if a record is dirty, cleaning may not be the solution. The predominant record player up until at least the 1970s, and perhaps later, used a ceramic cartridge tracking at 10 or more grams… and often one with a badly-worn stylus. All too often the cartridge was mono, which meant no vertical compliance, which meant increased wear and a brute force conversion of the groove itself to mono.
The combination of those things shows up most in highly modulated sections of the recording. It isn’t subtle. The orchestra swells and, as it does, it gets rattly. The only solution for those LPs, really, is the garbage bin. Digital noise reduction can help with clicks and pops, but not that kind of modulation damage to a groove. If it’s a performance you love, search for a new copy.
Other records may have been otherwise poorly treated. Cleaning isn’t going to remove scratches or anything else which has impacted on the physical form of the vinyl itself.
That said, visual inspection often doesn’t help. Yes, if you see a deep scratch you can be certain you’ll hear it. But surface scratches often don’t reach down to the point of stylus contact with the groove, and so can often escape audibility.
The LPs I bought, especially the ones from the recycling place, covered quite the range. Most were scuffed and some were simply filthy, others looked pristine... but not one of them sounded pristine. And none of them was fully repaired by any cleaning method. Some weren’t improved at all. But quite a few were markedly improved.
The problem is that you’re not going to be able to tell which will benefit in advance. It’s very much a matter of cleaning first, and then seeing if it worked.
testing
I did not want readers to have to take my word for any improvements. And, indeed, in some informal tests I did before getting right into it, I found myself quite disappointed by the lack of effectiveness of one cleaner. Then I realised that I was simply having trouble comparing the cleaned record to my recollection of what it had sounded like before.
So, I started recording. I used a Rega Planar 3 turntable with Rega Exact moving-magnet cartridge, and the nifty little Rega Fono Mini A2D phono preamplifier. The pre-amp has an analogue-to-digital converter built in. I plugged it into the USB socket of my computer and recorded a lot of LPs, immediately before and soon after cleaning them. In each case the only cleaning I did before the first recording was with an old carbon fibre brush, just to remove loose dust. And of course, I cleaned the stylus after each record playing.
When you’ve done one side, you flip the LP over and do the other side.
Also provided is a place to put the albums to dry. This is a simply a spindle, about 160mm tall, that sticks up from a stand. The stand is, cutely, made from an old album. There are ten spacers provided, so you can treat ten albums at a time, and then just let them dry. Also supplied is a small cup for pouring the fluid, plus a brush to apply it.
The instructions say that with a fan for good airflow, they could dry within an hour, but that will depend on temperature, humidity and how thick you put the stuff on. It’s not inexpensive, so you’ll be tempted to use the recommended 5mm of fluid per side. Once it has dried—it’s visually obvious when it has—you put a bit of sticky tape on the film and pull it up. Drying time was rather longer than an hour for me, but I’m in Canberra and I was doing the testing in winter. Be patient. bing at the surface with more sticky tape to get up strands left in the grooves. I found two ways to deal with this. One was to use a bit more fluid, which made the film thicker and thus stronger. The better way was to use the recommended amount, and when it had dried, put plenty of sticky tape over the film before pulling it up. I used 50mm wide packing tape. It took longer but it provided very sure results. If you do use 5ml of fluid per side, the 110ml of ESP provided with the system will do eleven LPs. The most economical way to do more is to purchase two of the larger (275ml) bottles of ESP at a time for $94.95. That will work out to a marginal cost of a little over $1.70 per LP.
VRCS PeRfoRmanCe
And you know what? It worked. Well, it worked on records in which there was audible dirt in the grooves. It made no difference to the records from my own collection on which I tried it. It can’t repair damage. It can only remove dirt and debris.
In some, the improvement was modest. But with the messiest records, the results were huge. Take a movie sound track album I picked up called Exodus. The sample in Graph 1 above is a ten second section from the middle of the title track. There are all manner of loud clicks as this section plays. After a turn through the VRCS, it retained some small clicks (and there were still some big ones elsewhere on the record), but most were eliminated. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the waveform images and play the sound files using the links.
Another was Leonard Bernstein conducting Holst’s, ‘The Planets’. Play the sample shown in Graph 3 and you’ll see that it’s totally unlistenable. It’s still pretty unlistenable after a treatment with VCRS, but only about a tenth as unlistenable. Even in the high modulation section at the start, the clicks and noises are powering through in the original. VCRS tames them. The quiet bit following is particularly revealing.
I gave this one a second treatment to see if perhaps there were any stubborn particles that could be removed second time around. I didn’t really notice any difference, although some were visible on the waveforms. So clearly there were a few specks of dirt remaining from the first application that came off with the second. When I listened for them specifically I could tell. But overall it made little difference.
On some, the improvement was modest, but with the messiest records, the results were huge