Cleaning vinyl LP records

It looks very interesting; not intended specifically for cleaning records but appears to do the job. I'm not sure about the tank size, it looks as though 12" records may have to be aligned on a diagonal to get them in.

If you are going to use it only on vinyl, a drop of isopropanol and a drop of wetting-agent (unperfumed washing-up liquid) in the distilled water might make it work more quickly or at a lower temperature. Don't use alsohol on shellac and don't prolong the immersion, as some shellac mixtures contained cotton or wood fibres which swell up when wet. Beware of any unusual historic record materials - they may turn out to be gelatine!

Critically, drying it is going to be the biggest problem. Slow draining will allow debris-laden water to capillary into the groove bottoms and concentrate any muck. Ideally it should be dried by strong suction to get the water out as quickly and thoroughly as possible. (The Keith Monks machine did it this way)

If you only want one good playing for digitising purposes, play it wet and keep it wet throughout the playing time with a spray bottle of water. A record that has been washed will often get noiser as it dries.

The claim that it cured a jumping groove is a curious one. I have known cleaning to have this effect when the jumping was caused by encrustations of a sugary substance spattered over the disc (by someone coughing with a mouthful of food?). In general, most jumps are caused by groove damage and would not be altered by cleaning.

You can probably build your own ultrasonic cleaner, I did this project to clean a boat outside hull:

There are two sizes listed, and other offerings are even larger. Tub dimensions are given, if I recall.

Yes, this is a standard recipe, and is almost what Sebastian uses.

Yes. Sebastian appears to be doing pure vinyl disks only.

I'd rinse it off with straight alcohol, maybe then spin dry it.

Or blow it off using filtered clean dry compressed air. Maybe while the disk is spinning.

Yes, something water-soluble is likely.

Joe

I put together a somewhat similar home-brew setup, using a Quantrex ultrasonic tank I inherited from an estate (just *barely* large enough to hold two LPs), and a 2 RPM DC-motor holder/rotator purchased through Amazon. Cleaning solution is distilled water, a small amount of isopropanol, a few drops of TergiKleen surfactant, and just a smidge of an anti-static quaternary.

Yes, getting the loosened gunk out of the grooves is very important.

The approach I've seen recommended (and use) is to ultrasonicate, then hold the LP over a sink and spray-rinse it with distilled water. Once it rinses clean, gently dry with a clean micro-fiber cloth, and put it in a stand to air-dry.

Using a vaccum dryer (I have a Record Doctor) also works, but it's important to make sure that the velvet pads around the vacuum slot are clean and in good condition so you don't re-contaminate the record.

I've had a few over the years that did have a piece of something gunky stuck in the groove - mostly used records I purchased, but I think there was at least one which came "new" with some debris adhered to the surface. Quality control and cleanliness in the pressing plants isn't always what it ought to be :-(

I've used a lot of cleaning systems over the years... Discwasher, Staticmaster, dry carbon-fiber brush, the BBC-archive "record peel" solution/film, the Record Doctor wet-and-vacuum, and probably others as well. At this point I'm quite sold on the benefits of a proper ultrasonic cleaning - it has worked better than any other method I have tried.

In one batch I did earlier this year, I cleaned an obscure, long- out-of-print LP I've had in my collection since my high-school days in the early 1970s. I'd made several attempts over the years to clean it well enough to get a satisfactory digital transcription of it, but there were always pops and ticks and some low-level grunge and distortion which left me unsatisfied.

One cycle of ultrasonic cleaning and a good rinse-and-dry fixed all of this. I'm not sure it sounded this good even when newly pressed. There were one or two tiny "tick" sounds on each side (easily repaired in Audacity) but the overall groove noise was extremely low. Parts of the recording which had sounded distorted before, were now quite clean. It quite amazed me... same turntable and cartridge and electronics, so the cleaning was the only different factor.

I ended up contacting the bandleader and sending him the files... he was glad to have them since he had never gotten a good digital transcription of the album, and the master tapes had apparently been lost over the years.

It depends how many discs you wanted to treat. You could finish up wasting a lot of alcohol and generating an explosion risk.

That might work better than the vacuum system but both have the potential to create static charges on the disc surface which will attract dust and make it noisy again.

Use deionized water with some ethyl alcohol in it? As the alcohol evaporates, it leaves what it dissolved as dust in the water, so the dissolved stuff won't re-deposit, it will wash away.

How strong does an air knife nozzle need to be just to blow the water away?

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How would pure clean air cause charging? Doesn't triboelectric charging require solids and/or liquids. Mostly.

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I bet there is a solution in this.

Joe

I suppose that if you had two or more ratty records and wanted to make a good digital copy, you could play them all and do some clever processing.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The idea was peoposed by Peter Copeland of the UK National Sound Archive about 20 years ago. At the time it wasn't possible to synchronise the two copies accurately over a long period of time but he did manage to synchronise them for a few seconds, which was long enough to demonstrate that the idea worked

His concept was to have multiple copies on a 'cake-stand', all playing simultaneously. The speed variations due to the turntable would be the same for all copies and offset errors due to variations in the starting point would be constant, so there would only be variations caused by excentricity and ovality for the software to remove.

What most people don't realise is that a mono disc already contains two copies of the sound, one on each groove wall; it is the difference between these two copies that is used by my archival disc player to identify the unwanted noise.

The processing should obviously be digital. That would fix speed variations, noise, skips, everything.

It's no doubt being done already.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Why is that the first thing everyone says?

Nobody has made a digital system that works in real-time and can be built into the base of a record player with a single control knob (as far as I know). If it could be done in digital, why hasn't anyone done it?

I was thinking of processing playbacks from several different disks, to improve quality.

Surely a disk had some amount of 50/60 Hz hum lurking in the noise floor. That could be used for timebase corrections.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I recall reading that exactly this was done back in the days of tubes. Don't recall where, but it may have been mentioned on SED.

Joe

If the record is not exactly centered on the turntable (which it won't be) there will be a once/rev speed wobble. That can be mathed out too, especially if multiple playbacks are available.

Same with tape noise/wow/flutter. Maybe that's what "remastering" means, lots of cool DSP.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Yes.

Could well be.

That's basically what Liz T is doing, but in Steampunk form. I'm waiting for a Steampunk Klingon starship.

Joe

I have never heard any hum on a professional disc, even using a sharp filter in an attempt to detect it. A lot of the pre-war equipment used battery power for the amplifiers and weight-motors for the turntable drive, so there was no source of hum at all. Even the gears in the leadscrew drive can be heard on some early recordings - but no hum.

Some German recordings from the 1930s have a curious musical harmonic background sound but I suspect this is caused by a ventilating fan in the studio and is unlikely to be repeatable in frequency or synchronised to the mains.

Pressings are rarely identical. Depending on how much they had cooled when they were taken from the press, they may be slightly oval - and most records are slightly warped. Stampers stretched during their pressing life too. If you are attempting to synchronise the cycles of the recorded waveform, these errors become significant.

Sometimes the metalwork was damaged and a new master had to be cut, this will be significantly different from the previous one. (The Harry Lime Theme was recorded by Decca to their pre-war standard, then re-recorded after the cutter amplifier had been converted to FFRR - so two very different versions exist with exactly the same matrix and catalogue numbers.)

For accurate remastering, there should be none at all.

The art of professional remastering is to get all the geometry right and correct any errors in the reverse order to that in which they occurred. Once you have the best possible analogue signal, digitise it and confine your digital manupulation to basic manual editing.

Something like Cedar can, if used correctly and sparingly, put the final polish on a good recording, but using DSP to 'correct' other errors is something done by amateurs who don't know any better.

Or maybe not done by people who don't know how.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I found it, but not on SED if I recall. Here is what Google found:

"The hidden background noise that can catch criminals", Tom Scott, 21 December 2021.

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Joe