I'm sure this has been talked to death but I'm curious on the opinions of the Gruv Glide. I saw this out at guitar center and on needledoctor, it's also fairly pricey for a liquid based cleaner. So, I dunno. Any thoughts on that? I have the AudioTechnics liquid based kit now and it just seems to create more surface noise to be honest. I was reading a thread about using Carbon Brushes, which I'll give a try now.

I use Gruv Glide occasionally. Subjectively, it doesn't seem to hurt. I haven't done any numeric testing on it. Some people (who rank fairly highly in the audiophile pecking order) swear by the stuff.

If anybody could hunt down an Audio review of Gruv Glide, they might have been able to give a thorough test of the product. I have managed to come across their review of a similar Audio-Technica product (LifeSaver) that showed an objective reduction in surface noise and THD after 100 plays, compared to an untreated record.

Theoretically, lubricating the disc may improve wow and flutter, due to reduced stylus drag force, and may perhaps reduce surface noise. The chemical interactions involved with the vinyl are still up in the air, but you'd think it would be bannned by now if it did anything really wrong to records.

Ah, I'm not worried about chemicals damaging the vinyl over a long period of time. Just the AudioTechnica kit I have seems to work sometimes on really shitty vinyls but if its just got some dust on it and some surface noise cleaning it off seems to make the surface noise worse untill a few plays later. And NO I'm not playing it wet. I'm guessing the liquid is leaving behind some residue it's picking up and the stylus eventually just digs it all out. But I guess for dusting off records and such a carbon brush is the way to go right?

That's up to debate. Some engineers back in the day believed that a good velvet brush is better than a carbon fiber brush.... Cleaning regimens can have somewhat unpredictable effects on playback quality. A recent SH.tv thread revolved around a guy who cleaned a record and played it back three times. The first play was very noisy, the third play was pretty much silent. It's hypothesized that: playback immediately after a fluid cleaning still involves a thin layer of water on the record; the first playback kicks all the dust off the record, and the next playback is far quieter; improper formulations leave deposits on the record; etc.

Most audiophiles will recommend a vacuum record cleaning machine. The KAB EV-1 is cheap ($150!) and delivers the goods. But even then they're somewhat tweaky.

These three threads are the most informative I've ever seen on the subject:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ea...ime&4&5
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ea...ime&4&5
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ea...ime&4&5

A vacuum cleaner used with cleaning solution or just de-ionized distilledwater is the prob the best way to clean records.

If you don't vacuum, the wet dirt just dries on the surface and can be even harder to remove. Which may be why your LP's sound good for one play right after the solution and then worse later.

De-ionized Distilled water is fine for everything but sticky stuff, old solvents and very dirty records. For those there are a variety of solutions which use very mild solvents or dilute detergents. You can buy them or find recipes on the internet. It's important to use distilled water that has been de-ionized so you don't get a mineral build up.

If you have a record collection you want to maintain, it's worth the investment and effort. And if you play dirty records, it's a good idea to clean your stylus using a little distilled water and a stylus brush.

When I had a record collection, cleaning just about eliminated surface noise.

Edit: Axon beat me to it!

Count me as one more who considers vacuum devices the way to go. If you apply a liquid cleaner to an LP, it needs to be removed before it evaporates and deposits the dirt back onto the groove walls.

It strikes me there are only three possible methods of liquid removal: (i) vacuuming, which does work; (ii) centrifuging, which as far as I know isn't used by any current devices; and (iii) capilliary action, which is what all the brush-based systems rely on. Gut feeling tells me that capilliary action can't be very efficient at removing the last traces of liquid, so it'll never work as well as vacuuming. And my experience bears this out: the Moth vacuum device I use definitely does the best cleaning job of any system I've tried.

That said, I've never tried Gruv Glide, maybe it works in a different way?

My impression of the product, from a wee bit of reading some years ago, is that it goes on after the LP is clean.

As far as cleaning goes, the real difficulty is in determining any facts. Everyone has opinions and many are vociferously about defending them, but how does one actually measure results?

Vacuuming seems most reasonable to me too, but the Disk Doctor technique, claimed to be as effective, without a vacuum machine, is apparently used by many archiving establishments (proper wiping cloths, not brushes, are used to remove the dirt and liquid).

I am one of those guys from "back in the day". I used to get lots of used vinyl (cheap - often $0.25 to $1.00 per disk) that needed severe cleaning.

The preferred method in the 1970s for those who didn't have an expensive, tweaky vacuum setup was simple: dishwashing soap and a soft, lint-free cloth. It worked for me hundreds of times.

Get a sink full of warm water and a bit of Joy with an old soft washcloth, soak those old disks and then clean them with a gentle circular motion. Rinse well with more warm water then pat dry with another soft cloth. This loosens the old dirt very well and rinses it away.

Sometimes labels would get damaged, but at those prices I didn't care. I still have a small part of that collection left - perhaps 500 or so LPs. And no, I never listen to them anymore!

Tap water varies considerably from place to place. Here it leaves un-removable deposits. Although I do not notice anything from years of dish washing, a drop or two on a glass microscope slide leaves a tiny ring of hard substance after it evaporates. Three different products, and hot white vinegar, were unable to remove the deposits. The highly filtered water (reverse osmosis) I use leaves no deposits. This can't be good stuff to have in the record grooves.

In context, this wasn't a concern. Vinyl was cheap and the records were frequently damaged from use before I got them. Whatever the negatives of tap water, it was greatly outweighed by other factors. Of the 3,000 or so LPs I used to have, only a very small percentage were ever so well pressed as to warrant extra special treatment; most were at best only adequate, even when new.

I only applied the dishwasher method to used discs that were really dirty, otherwise I used various products of the day - carbon fiber brushes, the "Discwasher" products, etc. - to keep dirt off.

At 49 years old, I can recall many, many struggles with vinyl - endless warped or noisy releases, off-center pressings, horrible sounding mastering, accidental damage from dropped tonearms, tip-toeing around the room to avoid jarring the turntables, etc., etc. It was always a mediocre sounding medium, but for those of us who loved music it was the only game in town.

The best part of vinyl was the space available for album art. That was nice.

I know that many younger folks consider vinyl nostalgic, but you can count me as one musician who was overjoyed to see it replaced with something that actually worked. As I said, I still have a little left (500 or so discs) but they are pretty much dead media. I have converted my few ultra-rare LPs to digital format, but the rest are likely to be dumped shortly. They are just no fun, and fun is what I want!

Noted, although that is a rather off-topic response. I don't want this thread turning into a vinyl debate.

EDIT: Record treatments should be pretty easy to compare in an A/B fashion through needle dropping. Note however that there is some suggestion that playing back a dirty record can embed some of the deposits into the groove, reducing the effectiveness of a cleaning cycle performed immediately afterwards. I've never seen hard evidence of that occurring though.

I can't think of any way to do A/B comparisons, except perhaps as statistics on a large pool. The condition of every LP is different, what can you compare?

I once did a small sample to test soaking. Soaking is a consideration because, in many other places, "dirt" can be extremely hard to remove without it. Consider cooked on food (the stylus applies very high pressures and consequently produces high local temperatures that, it is claimed, can fuse the vinyl surface) or consider what often accumulates on an automobile engine exterior over time. If properly soaked long enough (overnight), most material comes off easily, but can be extremely difficult to scrub off without soaking.

I cleaned a number of LPs (five, I believe) with my usual multi-step process, which includes vacuuming. I recorded them. I ran a declicking transform which returns a count of clicks processed.

Then I soaked the LPs (one side at a time) with a cleaning solution, kept in place for 30+ minutes and gently redistributed every little bit. Then I re-did the whole cleaning routine. The same declicking routine, run on new recordings, found fewer clicks, about 10% to 22% fewer. The numbers were different for each disk.

This is hardly definitive. Other explanations are possible, but it is suggestive. If the click reduction is related to the soaking, or just the second cleaning, then there seems to be a lot of room for improvement. I'm reasonably sure my normal cleaning routine would remove anything ready to come off, but it is hard to know just what goes on a the bottom of those very tiny grooves. A high power stereo microscope might be used to give some idea about cleaning effectiveness, but it could be difficult to draw conclusions even from that.