What devices have you found useful when inspecting your stylii for cleanliness?

RB wrote, "my current tone arm is a fixed head-shell design so I cannot easily get a good viewing angle - the arm does not tilt much."  Do you really think one can inspect the rear of the stylus and the cantilever (which also can accumulate dirt and debris) without removing the cartridge from the headshell, in that situation?  All the magnification in the world is not going to allow a good view of the back end of the stylus and cantilever.  With my Triplanar, I can flip the headshell over on its back for inspection of the stylus/cantilever, without removing the cartridge from the tonearm or altering the azimuth (once the cartridge is reverted to playing position), but this does not seem to be possible with RB's tonearm.

Vivitar lighted magnifier from Amazon. Cheap and easy to use. Had mine for many years. 

On of those inexpensive LED microscopes from AMZ.

Mirrors and magnification.in dentistry they have small mouth mirrors and glasses with magnification loops.a surplus store might have some.i have used these alot in surgery.fiber optic scope like they use in auto industry might work they have lcd screens with magnification.i have some pediatric scopes I use to get stuff out of small kids lungs but they are way too expensive.we have huge monitors hi Def great detail. My rigid zero degree sinus scopes would work you might be able find some used on ebay.depends on how bad you want to see it.people send thier stylus in to be rebuilt you could call one of these companies and ask how they do it.enjoy the music

Checking after each side is played is over-doing it IMO. I check when I turn the system on, while warming up: check, typically ok, or brush a speck of dust, or maybe if I see something more stylus cleaning fluid with it's cap brush. Or, you hear something, sure enough, a bit of ...... hanging on the stylus

IF you are finding anything more that occassional dust, frequently finding gunk on your stylus, then it is digging that out of dirty grooves, you need to do a better job cleaning them.

I no longer use a brush to clean the LP, it pushes dust down into the grooves I think. I use a large lint free eyeglass cloth, a manual spin, a light wipe of any surface dust center to outer edge (I have forced air hvac, airborne dust)

My old LPs from high school/college days were filthy, noisy, gunk on the stylus frequently. I manually scrub the crap out of them with infant scalp brush, the advanced stylus gets deeper in the cleaned grooves than the elliptical I had in those days, they sound surprisingly listenable again. Setup for perfect imaging, whistle while I work, batches of 10