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Cleaning Records

I have a rather small record collection made up of about 25% new records, 25% old albums that I've purchased from local shops, and 50% old albums of my dad's that have been sitting in the garage for a good 10 years.
As far as cleaning goes, I guess the obvious part is buying a carbon-fiber brush to dust them off before each play, but I'm lost as to what I should do to REALLY clean them. I only spent about $400 on my turntable, so buying a VPI record cleaner used for $800 doesn't seem right for me right now. Are there any cleaners that do a comprabale job for under $100 if possible, possibly $200. How should I go about cleaning without a cleaning machine? People have talked about washing their records. Does this process actually include holding the record in the sink and pouring deionized water over it? How would I clean it?
If I were to clean it with a cloth, would I move around the record in circles as opposed to moving from the label outward? I've seen a lot of "record-cleaning solutions". How does one use these? Just mix it in water and pour it on the record? Wouldn't it harm the record to actually apply force to it when "scrubbing"?
I found a bottle of D4 that I bought a while ago. Should I use it? And if yes, do I dillute it in water first?
I'm obviously very new to all of this, and I would appreciate any help.
boxingnun
jfrech's avatar
jfrech
1,816 posts
 
Buy a can of Premeir cleaner from amusicdirect.com or elusivedisc.com or somewhere like that. For $20 a can it'll thouroughly clean 50 records. All you need to go with it is a carbon fiber brush. Does a great job, best i've used w/o going with my vacumn vpi setup.
sidssp
1,077 posts
 
I clean my LPs manually using Disc Doctor's products with excellent results. The cleaning instruction is posted on their web site (http://discdoc.com/). It is worthwhile to take a look.
bblo
2 posts
 
save yourself a few bucks from all these fancy cleaners. As Eldartford said, wash your records with warm water and dishwashing detergent works well with a velvet brush/cloth. The biggest trap is not to let your records just lie there and dry, otherwise you'll have watermarks left on your records and all these efforts wasted. After washing those dirty vinyls I dry them with towel and then spray them with a mixture of about 70% alcohol and 30% distilled water. So they will dry up in no time and you can happily put them back in their sleeves or play them straight away without pops and ticks.
marakanetz's avatar
marakanetz
5,473 posts
 
I clean my records if I know cleaning will save them.
If cleaning will not save them I simply let them go to the backyard and replace them with better copy if neccessary.
Having established a great record collection, I acquired VPI HW16.5 and cleaned almost the whole collection whereever it was neccessary using VPI supplied liquid and than acquired a gallon of Nitty Gritty fluid.
Than I sold VPI since my record will only need sweaping for I guess next 10...12 years. They're all stored in polylined sleeves in good jackets(I always repair edge-,corner-, and ring- weared jackets with masking tape to preserve its life).
motdathird
77 posts
 
There seems to be a lot of approaches to cleaning records. Some are sound and others are just downright destructive. I suggest checking out the thread on this site called "record-playing rituals". There is a debate as to whether using alcohol is a wise thing especially anything more than a 10% solution.
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