Wet and dry record cleaning – done quickly…
By Roy Gregory
If you buy records – and especially if you buy secondhand records – you need a way of cleaning them. It’s not just grime from a long and busy life. It’s getting shot of crap like Mold Release Agent (MRA) that pollutes the surface of brand-new discs, adding rustling, clicks and pops to your otherwise pristine discs – noise that (mostly) disappears once they’re properly cleaned. To add grist to the mill, cleaned records sound better too. So, what’s not to like? Well, the actually act of cleaning, itself. It’s a sad fact that most record collectors and audiophiles are men – and that most men are allergic to cleaning anything, let alone the several hundred records they just acquired! And therein lies the rub. Whilst I’ve always been a fan of record cleaning machines, I’ve also been wary of the time and complication that too many of them involve. For me, such machines are self-defeating. If they take too long to clean a record or they are too mind-numbingly boring (or unpleasant) to use, they’ll quickly end up in the corner, gathering dust and your precious vinyl won’t be receiving the pampering it needs.
For many years I relied on various VPIs – the HW-16.5, the HW-17 or the later, more powerful, Typhoon. In the case of the latter machines, I dispensed with the on-board liquid dispensing, simply using the vacuum suction to dry manually cleaned discs. They may not have been the last word in record cleaning, but they were quick. Quick enough to clean a record on the fly, before playing it. That meant that they got used and my records got cleaned.
Later, I graduated to the Kuzma ‘kebab’ cleaner, a motorized ‘spit’ that rotated up to ten records at a time in an ultrasonic bath. Having experienced the benefits of ultrasonic cleaning over and above a simple wet and dry regime, the multi-record capability quickly won me over, although I was less of a fan of the need to air dry the discs. At present, I’m still using both the Kuzma and the Typhoon on an ‘as needed’ basis. Bulk cleaning on the Kuzma, quick and not so dirty on the VPI. But what if you could have the best of both worlds, an ultrasonic cleaner that dried the disc too – and did it in a simple, automated process? Sold! To the man with the large record collection and the stack of as yet uncleaned discs. “If only” – I can hear myself thinking…
Time to meet the Vinyl Cleaner Premium, the rather uninspiring name of just such an offering, from that audio mouthful, AudioDeskSysteme Glass.
What price convenience?
In this case – €2,799.
That might seem like a lot of money for a record cleaning machine – and, in truth, it is. But that doesn’t stop it being money well spent…
The iconoclastic Tim Gläss first came to the attention of yours truly and other audiophiles with the introduction of his CD Sound Improver, a compact, manual lathe that cut a bevel on the outer edge of your optical discs. Launched in1998, it stayed in production until 2017, although with significant recent advances in CD replay, it’s true value has re-emerged, initiating a scramble for secondhand machines. Given the resurgence in interest, the company are planning to put an improved version back into production, which is great news indeed.
