First, as an aside to Doug: As a writer and sometime English professor, I loved your post regarding the wording of the RRL instructions--one of my favorite yet on Audiogon. Nice to see that some folks here pay attention to language as well as to our systems!
I've been following the various cleaning threads in this forum for some time. The 16.5 I bought used 5 months ago came with some DD brushes and fluids; I've been using both by default, and rinsing with the dreaded grocery-store distilled water (in fact, I've tended to do anywhere from 3-5 rinse passes, since after the first two rinses I'm often still lifting suds with the vacuum tube). I've noticed that sometimes all my cleaning and rinsing has really improved the surface noise of certain LPs, but other times hasn't done much with others. (Recently I even made some pre- and post-cleaning recordings on CD-R to see what kinds of surface noise improvements I was getting.) So I think I'll be trying some RRL fluids soon too.
I came into this hobby via the software route, and was at first suspicious about cleaning LPs with a vacuum machine; the 16.5 and my own odd method have already turned me into a believer. If the RRL fluids are as big an improvement over others as David suggests, I think I'm in for a real treat (now I just need to upgrade my entire analog front-end!).
Joshua
I've been following the various cleaning threads in this forum for some time. The 16.5 I bought used 5 months ago came with some DD brushes and fluids; I've been using both by default, and rinsing with the dreaded grocery-store distilled water (in fact, I've tended to do anywhere from 3-5 rinse passes, since after the first two rinses I'm often still lifting suds with the vacuum tube). I've noticed that sometimes all my cleaning and rinsing has really improved the surface noise of certain LPs, but other times hasn't done much with others. (Recently I even made some pre- and post-cleaning recordings on CD-R to see what kinds of surface noise improvements I was getting.) So I think I'll be trying some RRL fluids soon too.
I came into this hobby via the software route, and was at first suspicious about cleaning LPs with a vacuum machine; the 16.5 and my own odd method have already turned me into a believer. If the RRL fluids are as big an improvement over others as David suggests, I think I'm in for a real treat (now I just need to upgrade my entire analog front-end!).
Joshua