How do you clean your LP's?

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   To the Vinyl Junkies among us, LP's produce brilliant sound quality in most cases but how do you clean them? 

When playing albums i use a "microfine" dusting brush, in the old days they recommended a barely damp soft cloth, or "Emitex" cleaning cloth. One album, "Beggar's Banquet", i took to an all-nite party the day i bought it, and in the morning i found it on the floor covered in beer!! A wash under the tap did the trick and i still play the same copy to this day.

There have been many cleaning systems and solutions over the years, the strangest was in the 70's, a thick glue-like substance which you smeared all over the LP and placed in a rack to dry. When dry you could peel it off like a skin, taking dust and tiny specks of grit with it. Later on there was a sticky roller-cleaner which was supposed to remove dust and dirt, but you had to keep washing it.

For years i used "Isopropyl Alcholhol" (applied with a soft cloth) which i was able to buy by the litre from the local chemist, unfortunately these days chemists won't sell it to me anymore and it seems to be only available over the internet by the ml. or the gallon, so i've had to look at other methods.

I still buy second-hand LP's on a regular basis and you usually find they are dusty, dirty and covered in greasy finger marks. In a shop you can check these but buying over the internet is risky. The worst horror story i had recently was a Supertramp live dble. album i bought advertised as "mint" looked like it had been stored in a shed, and the LP's were covered in dusty green mould!! I got a refund but the seller refused to refund my return postage! 

Many records issued during the 70's came in cardboard inner sleeves and  dust and grit usually acted as an abrasive on the record surface! I never did find a mint copy of "Houses of the Holy" ( my original copy through many many repeated plays had become "noisy"), those quiet passages during "No Quarter" sounded awful,  i ended up getting a new 180gram copy. Surface noise does not have to be mandatory when listening to LP's, i have many which have no surface noise at all!

The "Last" system i tried some time ago works fairly well but doesn't lift all the dirt from the grooves, it comes with a bottle of fluid and a plastic "brush" applied in a circular motion.

The system i use for cleaning at the moment involves two solutions, i bought a "Knosti Anti-stat" washing system ( basically a cheap version of the "Moth" cleaning machine, the Rolls-Royce of cleaning systems), which has a narrow bath to place the record in, mounted on a special "hub" which when rotated washes the record between two brushes. The special "Antistat Fluid" solution is £20 a litre including postage, it is highly concentrated and leaves a slightly sticky residue which makes the record stick to polythene inner sleeves. I tried reducing the consistency of the fluid with rainwater but to no avail. A further wash with "am record cleaner" available on ebay did the trick, it seems to be completely alchohol based and leaves no residue, though not completely effective on its own with the supplied cloth as it can't remove dirt from the bottom of the grooves. The antistatic properties of most cleaners are useful as it prevents dust being attracted by a static field evident on new records. 

So there you go, anyone got any magic cleaning solutions, systems or tips??

Edited by mystic fred - August 06 2006 at 07:29