RECORD CLEANERS COMPARED

I came 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.