fran
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duplicate post sorry
"clean enough for monitors" not "clean enough for headphones"?
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fran
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Its very hard to beat a wet/vacuum cleaner, and I speak from experience. I think a rule should be "don't wet clean if you're not going to vacuum". They are simple enough to make if you have the resources.
Those pops and clicks are caused by bacteria and moulds (ie fungus) which live down in the grooves. A record can be visually clean but those things are invisible to the naked eye so the record being visibly clean means nothing.
Cleaning solution: I use 25% isopropanol, 75% RO water and a few drops of rinse aid (triton X-100 is what you really want if you can lay your hands on it), maybe a teaspoon in a liter of mix. The idea behind this mixture is that it will act as a solvent for most things on the LP. The rinse aid acts as a wetting agent and allows the fluid to coat the surface. If you don't use this the fluid will simply gather on the surface.
As regards the use of white vinegar.... well vinegar is a brewed product containing acetic acid in low concentration along with god knows what else. Personally I wouldn't use it. I know its good for cleaning glass, but see my point above about visibly clean records.
Once your record is cleaned once, you should only have to use a carbon fibre brush if you handle carefully. Many advocate using a new inner liner too after you clean.
Cons: the cleaners are noisey - ideally do it in a basement or garage. Naturally it won't fix physical surface damage. Some records are worn and no matter how much you clean them it won't bring them all the way back. It takes about 5-7mins per lp to clean, thats at best about 10 lps an hour.
Pros: most records clean up extremely well and the pops and crackles almost completely dissappear.
Put it to you this way, I made my own and I'll never go back. Theres a some good threads on this over in www.diyaudio.com analogue section.
Fran
Those pops and clicks are caused by bacteria and moulds (ie fungus) which live down in the grooves. A record can be visually clean but those things are invisible to the naked eye so the record being visibly clean means nothing.
Cleaning solution: I use 25% isopropanol, 75% RO water and a few drops of rinse aid (triton X-100 is what you really want if you can lay your hands on it), maybe a teaspoon in a liter of mix. The idea behind this mixture is that it will act as a solvent for most things on the LP. The rinse aid acts as a wetting agent and allows the fluid to coat the surface. If you don't use this the fluid will simply gather on the surface.
As regards the use of white vinegar.... well vinegar is a brewed product containing acetic acid in low concentration along with god knows what else. Personally I wouldn't use it. I know its good for cleaning glass, but see my point above about visibly clean records.
Once your record is cleaned once, you should only have to use a carbon fibre brush if you handle carefully. Many advocate using a new inner liner too after you clean.
Cons: the cleaners are noisey - ideally do it in a basement or garage. Naturally it won't fix physical surface damage. Some records are worn and no matter how much you clean them it won't bring them all the way back. It takes about 5-7mins per lp to clean, thats at best about 10 lps an hour.
Pros: most records clean up extremely well and the pops and crackles almost completely dissappear.
Put it to you this way, I made my own and I'll never go back. Theres a some good threads on this over in www.diyaudio.com analogue section.
Fran
Michael G.
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Quote:
I would hate to scare someone away from vinyl just because they suppose that it is absolutely necessary to spend $200+ on an RCM ("record cleaning machine") right off the bat. I must add, for the sake of the poorer vinyl newbies, that there is one budget cleaning system I've found that works almost as well as a wet/vacuum RCM... sometimes. It is called Groovmaster, and it is sold by a guy on ebay for $25 to $40. Basically, it is a record clamping device with a handle on it for manual wet-cleaning and it protects the label from moisture during cleaning. Works with any size record. There is no vacuuming involved. You install the clamp, spray the record down with a good cleaning solution (I use Oxyclean), scrub down the record with a brush, rinse the record well under tap water, spray it all down again with a spray bottle filled with distilled water (as a final rinse), hand dry with a soft lint-free cloth, and set the record up vertically in a dish rack to dry thoroughly before playback. The cleaning takes a few minutes per record and the drying time 15 minutes or more, but I have gotten excellent results with Groovmaster - almost equal to that of a wet/vacuum RCM. It's a very good, affordable starting point for those just getting into vinyl...
| Originally Posted by Michael G. Vacuum cleaning is must. Even the best pressings on new, unplayed virgin vinyl can be noisy due to the presence of mold release - until they are cleaned on a wet, vacuum RCM system that is... After a thorough cleaning, the very best vinyl pressings will give you virtually noiseless playback. |
I would hate to scare someone away from vinyl just because they suppose that it is absolutely necessary to spend $200+ on an RCM ("record cleaning machine") right off the bat. I must add, for the sake of the poorer vinyl newbies, that there is one budget cleaning system I've found that works almost as well as a wet/vacuum RCM... sometimes. It is called Groovmaster, and it is sold by a guy on ebay for $25 to $40. Basically, it is a record clamping device with a handle on it for manual wet-cleaning and it protects the label from moisture during cleaning. Works with any size record. There is no vacuuming involved. You install the clamp, spray the record down with a good cleaning solution (I use Oxyclean), scrub down the record with a brush, rinse the record well under tap water, spray it all down again with a spray bottle filled with distilled water (as a final rinse), hand dry with a soft lint-free cloth, and set the record up vertically in a dish rack to dry thoroughly before playback. The cleaning takes a few minutes per record and the drying time 15 minutes or more, but I have gotten excellent results with Groovmaster - almost equal to that of a wet/vacuum RCM. It's a very good, affordable starting point for those just getting into vinyl...
Graham Maynard
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Hi V.
If your pickup is moving magnet then the sensing coils within the cartridge are unavoidably resonant at a high audio frequency. Normally this is tuned by C and damped by R.
Sometimes if there is insufficient parallel C there can be an unwanted peak between 15kHz and 20kHz. This peak can be excited by surface induced clicks, and it can lead to pre-amp/amplifier transient distortion, but it cannot be filtered out by subsequent tone controls; it needs to be dealt with at the cartridge/pre-amp input. You could try more C loading at the cartridge. The additional length of input lead is just a simple way of checking this out.
Might help ?
If your pickup is moving magnet then the sensing coils within the cartridge are unavoidably resonant at a high audio frequency. Normally this is tuned by C and damped by R.
Sometimes if there is insufficient parallel C there can be an unwanted peak between 15kHz and 20kHz. This peak can be excited by surface induced clicks, and it can lead to pre-amp/amplifier transient distortion, but it cannot be filtered out by subsequent tone controls; it needs to be dealt with at the cartridge/pre-amp input. You could try more C loading at the cartridge. The additional length of input lead is just a simple way of checking this out.
Might help ?
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