Cleaning records

One thing you cannot avoid when it comes to buying and playing records is cleaning them as finger prints can leave oily deposits and dirt and dust can get into the groove causing varying degrees of crackle or "rustling" in the background.

In vinyl's heyday at the record store counter you'd find various impregnated anti static cloths that worked rather like the cloths you use to clean your glasses with and if hifi was your thing you may of read and seen various fluids and record cleaning systems such as those by Keith Monks which some stores for a fee would clean your discs quite deeply.

Around two thousand sixteen as my record playing system started to improve I found myself needing something to clean some of my oldest records and oddly enough clean and take the static from brand new ones as some record plants aren't as clean as they should be.

This is what I used at the time with a pair of microfibre cloths to apply a cleaning fluid and remove it and any debris from them which worked rather well for a small amount of elbow grease doing it by hand.

Trying to get hold of some recently lead to the discovery it appeared to be no longer available, indeed the last lot I had was only in a small capacity and so some seven years on I was back to exploring cleaners which were.

I settled on this "Deep Track Cleansing" fluid with some cleaning cloths and stylus cleaner as actually from time to time you should clean that on your cartridge to remove and build up of dirt and dust by the company Vinyl Clear.

Interestingly this product is endorsed and used by Abbey Road Studios for cleaning reference records they use when working on newly mastered versions for comparisons using a tiny amount of clean ipa alcohol dissolved in distilled pure water (tap water is inpure containing lime amongst other things).

It came with a plastic record holder for allowing the cleaned disc to dry for a few minutes before putting in the inner sleeve ready for playing.

I might add if the sleeve is an old paper only one I'd resleeve it in either a polylined one or those japanese style rice paper ones so you don't reintroduce any dirt or paper acid you've just spent time removing.

This is available in various capacities - mine was 150 ml - and it does work well