[Todd]

HI All,

The first 4 people who email me will receive a free 2oz bottle of our TTVJ Vinyl Zyme Extra Strength Record Cleaner ($14.99) to sample with your impressions posted after use in this thread. If you have never used our record cleaning solution, please email me at todd@ttvjaudio.com and we will send you a bottle to try on us. We would appreciate a small review/comments on how it worked for you in this thread.

We are very confident that this will be the only record cleaner you will use once you give it a try.

Be sure to include your Head-Fi name and shipping address when you email me!

Our 8 oz Regular and Extra Strength are shown below with our 2oz bottle of Concentrate and a few other vinyl goodies.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Todd

 

[ajm87]

i would love to try this product.

 

[Todd]

Hi Guys,

No more participants....

I have 6 bottles going out - again I allowed a few more to participate.

ajm87, if you havent emailed me, do so and I will allow you to get a free bottle also - just follow the instructions in the first post and you will be included.

Todd

 

[Evshrug]

Hey Todd!
Interesting product! I’m very new to vinyl and so far have just used a carbon brush; about how often do you recommend using the cleaning solution / vinyl balm?

Subscribing to the thread to be notified about impressions

 

[Todd]

Looking for the reviews! Hope you all have had plenty of time to try our Vinyl Zyme and it has made your vinyl listening experience even better than it was!

Todd

 

[Evshrug]

Hi Everyone!
So, a lot of my vinyl is brand new, but I partnered up with my mom so we could spiff up her old collection (and bond over music!). She’s got some well known records from Prince and Fleetwood Mac, but also some lesser-known stuff. And, at one point, a few of her records were subjected to a bit of a basement flood.

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Thanks to Todd the Vinyl Junkie for providing a sample bottle of his enzyme (emulsifier?) for review and testing. Otherwise, I was not incentivized or directed in what to say here.

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The product comes in a squeeze bottle (maybe just in this 2 Oz. sample size?) with a cap that closes in a manner similar to a sunscreen bottle. The label is a nice looking sticker, but it’s a bit too tall for this bottle, and the instructions recommend “spraying” the solution on a disk. These two things lend a “cottage industry” feel to the product; this doesn’t affect the quality or hurt my impressions really.

Speaking of the instructions, they made the cleaning process sound simple. Maybe I’m just expecting the world to be too hard, but I expected there to be a more in-depth “right way” to clean, and a less effective way that might make things worse (like cleaning windows, you get less streaks on glass with the right cloth medium etc). What I did was (take a test listen before cleaning, then) put 6 droplets of the enzyme around the vinyl at regular intervals, and I used a clean cotton washcloth from my bathroom. Here, you can see a bit of a before and after effect because I just wet-cleaned the outer half of the rings, but what you can’t see are some light-brown spots that were removed from the vinyl… I think they were literally specs of dirt (this was a record in very poor condition):

I followed up by using my carbon brush after a minute… the record definitely looked cleaner, but I still had a fair bit of pops and crackles.

At this point I called up TTVJ’s number from their website to make sure I was doing it right; I reached Todd himself, who was very friendly and nice to talk to, and he didn’t know who I was (the thanked me for being a customer… I was not one at the time of review ) but treated me well anyway. He seemed to feel a towel like what I used was OK as long as it didn’t have a lot of lint. For my part of the conversation, I don’t think I impressed on him how new I was to vinyl, but that was my own issue!

Next up, I tried to wet-clean another record with the vinyl zyme, and this time I used a microfiber cloth that I normally use for wiping clean my electronics screens. After cleaning, I believe this resulted in less of a deep clean, BUT overall it was better and there was less pops and clicks because it was better at not depositing lint onto the vinyl.

Using the microfiber cloth:

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So, while I don’t think the enzyme miraculously solves every vinyl-related problem all by itself (I feel like I’m going to want to pick up a “Stasis Ninja Clean Towel” from Todd’s store before I use the vinyl zyme on my new records), it definitely lifted some heavy-duty gunk and improved the tracking on some well-worn records, and I think I shall continue to explore its effects

My mom felt like the vinyl had greater depth and more natural timbre in the vocals with the vinyl than when I compared with my Apple Music streamed on the same headphones (we used both an HD 650 and an HD 800); I think that usually the recording studios and vinyl manufacturers have far better quality DACs they use to create the analog vinyl than I have in my DAC at home