03 SPin-clean record WaSher SyStem mkii
‘Proudly manufactured and handassembled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania since 1975.’ So says a note in the manual for our third record cleaning system.
Well, that’s clear enough. The Spin-Clean system has been around since the pinnacle of vinyl dominance in home entertainment. Presumably back in 1975 it was a Mk I system. Again, this is a well thought-out cleaning system. The main body is a bright yellow tub for washing your records. This is a bit longer than a 12 inch LP is wide. The tub floor is curved. At each end are slots with rollers. Your records go in vertically. The rollers keep the record vertical.
You fill the tub to the marked level with distilled water and three capfuls of the included Spin Clean fluid. The record label stays clear of the water (but you should be careful of drips, so keep a paper towel handy). Two cleaning pads are held vertically by slots in the middle of the tub. You push your record down between them until it is in place on the two rollers, then rotate it three revolutions one way, three revolutions the
other way, the pull it out and dry it off with the two absorbent cloths included with the system.
The instructions say that when you’ve done that, they’re ready to be played or put away. I was a little leery of that, figuring that the drying cloths wouldn’t really get down to the bottoms of the grooves, so I carefully placed the records in racks so that they could air dry for a few hours before playing them or putting them away.
There are roller slots for 12 inch LPs, 45 rpm 7 inch singles, and 10 inch 78rpm recordings. The cleaning pads feel like velvet. The fibres, such as they are, do not seem likely to reach the bottoms of the grooves.
Performance
I confess that I was not expecting much from this system. The other two systems seemed designed to get stuff out of the bottom of the groove, whether through adhesion or through loosening with a fluid and brush, followed by vacuuming. This did not seem to offer a way to get right in there. But, then, what did I find? The difference to some records was, according to my notes ‘stuff all’ to ‘maybe a slight improvement’ on some. And then I came to a Strauss ‘Die Fledermaus’ from the recycling shop. And, bang, those six spins through the Spin Clean removed the majority of the major ticks and clicks.
Then there was the Tchaikovsky Masterpiece album. Look at the graph waveforms in Graphs 11 and 12 and you’ll hardly see a difference. Play the two audio clips, however, and the noise over the rather highly modulated music is substantial on the original, largely gone on the cleaned disk.
Spin-clean record Washer System mkII
Six spins through the Spin Clean removed the majority of the major ticks and clicks
$149 Interdyn Pty Ltd (03) 9426 3600 www.projectaudio.com.au