When you receive this device in its shipping box and read the instructions, you will need to accomplish some preliminary steps before the machine is ready for use. The disk will be supported with its label out of the fluid. You can adjust this unit to clean 12” disks, 78-rpm disks, and 45-rpm disks, simply by moving the rollers into corresponding slots in the tank. The disk turns on rollers inserted into the tank (see Photo 2). You plunge your LP into the narrow space between the brushes, which are submerged by the cleaning fluid, and you rotate the disk by hand. This cleaner consists of a cleaning fluid tank containing rollers and a pair of brushes (see Photo 1). Serious collectors might spring for their own Keith Monks machine, or some other brand, but they are expensive and take up a lot of space.Įd Dell lent me the Spin-Clean Record Washer System MKII for review.
And I have a box of used library-sale LPs awaiting transfer to my hard drive. However, I no longer live in San Diego, and it is a bit far out of my way to travel that distance simply to clean a new batch of old LPs. This always made an audible difference in the LPs’ playback quality. When I lived in San Diego, I would occasionally take a handful of used LPs to the local super-fi emporium, which would let me clean them myself on a Keith Monks record-cleaning machine for $0.50 per LP. Here, you are taking your chances, and you might want to give your used finds a good cleaning before trusting them to an expensive stylus. This is adequate for records I have purchased new and kept in good shape, but it is not trustworthy when I buy used records at shops or at library benefit sales. Eventually, he found a detergent that could do this, which he confirmed by testing the used cleaning solution for the presence of vinyl lubricants.īecause it really works, I have used the D4/Zerostat routine religiously when playing LPs, especially prior to transferring my best LPs to my computer for remastering in the digital domain. Of course, it is mostly water, but he added a detergent that removed dust and oily fingerprints from the record without “pulling” the lubricant component from the vinyl formulation. I still use the Discwasher fluid.ĭuring his talk, Maier discussed earlier products’ failure to properly clean records and he explained how he came up with his system, detailing his development of the cleaning formula. The Discwasher brand is now owned by another company, and reports of its brush quality on the Web are not flattering. Both of these cleaning appliances still exist in one form or another. When moistened with D3 fluid, the brush would pick up dust in spite of the electrostatic attraction, and the record would sound much cleaner.īecause drying strokes by the brush would recharge the static electricity on the LP, you could follow the cleaning by using a Zerostat antistatic gun to discharge the static. Mechanically, the velvet fibers would get into the LP grooves as long as the brush was properly oriented. The Discwasher consisted of a D3 (now D4) vinyl cleaning fluid and a walnut brush handle covered on one side by directed-pile velvet cloth.
Bruce Maier, a chemist and the inventor of the Discwasher record-cleaning tools. In the mid-1970s, I attended a San Diego Audio Society meeting in San Diego, CA. Photo 1: Spin-Clean’s record washing system enables you to clean both sides of your LP at once.
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