What is the best way to clean Vinyl?

@whart 

Thanks for your further response.  You have clearly been in this a lot deeper than I.

I am really lucky (deaf?) because I get no surface noise issues with my playback once I have cleaned the records that need it on my Nitty Gritty.

The reason for posting again is your mention of the US Library of Congress.  You will probably know that Simon Yorke supplied transcriptor players to the US Library of Congress that were used to make digital copies of a large number of analogue discs of all sorts of dimensions and specifications.

I came across Simon in his earlier years in County Durham, NE England.  I had acquired an S2 Zarathustra that is a truly rare hi-mass sprung turntable.  Simon says he made less then ten.  I visited him in the late 1980s to acquire some spares for that and to audition his S7 with unipivot arm.  I bought that.  As you will know, it was Michael Fremer's reference player for some eight years before he travelled way upmarket, boosted by discounts available. It was a very good player, miles ahead of his S2 that in turn was miles ahead of my early Linn that it replaced.  The unipivot arm was said to be the S7's weak point but I never moved to replace it.

Simon had become a friend and he spoke over a long period of his development of a parallel tracking arm.  He let me know when he had it in production and I visited him, now in Spain, for a few days to chew the fat, enjoy the local Spanish cuisine and beverages and audition his S10, a development of the S7 and, most importantly, the Aeroarm.

Well, if you have never heard it, this combination is wonderful as long as you choose a lightweight high compliance cartridge.  Matches made in heaven are Ortofon A90, 95 and now Verismo.  It is also very good with van den Huls and the AT1000

This truly is a world class player and far less costly than the blingy $000,000 heavyweights that purport to populate the high end of the market today.

Simon is a really nice guy but over the years his negative marketing traits have not been kind to his business.  So I was lucky to get in on the ground floor with Aeroarm #003 the first customer piece.  There are only a handful of customer Aeroarms and will be no more.  Simon is out of the business now but we keep in touch from time to time.

@whart 

Thanks for that.  I don't suppose you got to meet Simon.  He had installed that equipment many years previously.

Here we go again with the cleaning fetish.  Last iteration was only a month or two back.

Once again, I say I rarely hear surface noise on my records.  If I do, I clean on my Nitty Gritty I have had for 40+ years now.  Then I put the disc in a new Nagaoka inner, so I know it's been cleaned.  I have cleaned perhaps 15-20% of my 4,000 odd collection, judging by the number of new sleeves I have bought..  I can only recollect VERY few times I have heard noise again on a record I have cleaned, so re-cleaning is very rare.

So.  How much noise do people hear?

It might be suggested that failing to clean a record before playing it allows deposits to cause wear on the LP in play (or on the stylus).  Well, with some discs in my collection 60+ years I have not heard this.  Nor do my stylii wear prematurely; indeed with my parallel tracking arm running typically at 2.5g (a bit less for the van den Huls) they mostly outlast constructor's life estimates.

There are those here who clean every record before play.  I regard this as truly obsessive behaviour, but I wonder if repeated cleaning (especially wet cleaning and brush/pad contact cleaning) causes damage?

@whart   Thanks for your reply.  I've got a lot of respect for your postings on vinyl replay.  They are a well-balanced view of the issues.

I can't argue with cleaning discs that need to be cleaned.  I am questioning the need to clean those that have already been cleaned or do not require cleaning.  As you rightly say, a happy medium is best - for the listener and the LPs - pun intended.

Yes, I bought some discs that had been cleaned with unsuitable materials and I had to clean them.  Pre the ultrasonics, this was not always successful and I would be interested to know if ultrasonic cleaners can clear all the gunk some people have put on.   I used to think they had eaten dinner off some of them.

Having been around a long time, in the shop I soon learned to avoid the sticky messes and examined surfaces carefully with my short sight or even a magnifying glass before buying.  Yes, with ultra rare discs at bargain prices there is of course a temptation, but by 1989 I had pretty well bought all the used titles I wanted from the 1950s 60s golden age and then I could pick and choose as everyone was outing vinyl, including of course stocks of unsold unopened records.  Glory days they truly were; nothing cost more than £1 a disc and everything was on offer. WOW. I was buying nearly hundreds a month that are the backbone of my collection of 4000+.  For the last 30 years I have mainly bought special pressings, very few now and only from the one or two manufacturers that make consistently reliable discs.

@fleschler   "I have a rule I made up, if I don't want to hear a record at least 3 times annually, out it goes."

This statement doesn't add up arithmetically.  You currently have 28,500 records.  You dispose of records you don't play 3 times a year.  I assume each side is 20 minutes, you listen to the whole record and you spend 40 hours per week listening.  in a year you have 2080 hours to listen to only 1040 records 3 times each.  Ergo you should have only 1040 records, not 28,500.  If you listen continuously 24 hours per day, you can still only retain 4368 records.