To clean or not to clean...

I clean EVERY VINYL, OLD OR NEW before ever playing it - every single time.  I clean EVERY VINYL, OLD OR NEW that I can get my hands on, whether it's my record or not.  If I go to a friend's house and I see a turntable, I plead with them to let me take all of their records home and clean them (sometimes I bring them back).  I go to thrift stores and yard sales just to find dirty, moldy records that I can clean - if they look like someone used them for Frisbees at one time or are stuck with goo in the sleeve, even better.  I have gone so far as to buy lots of records at a Goodwill (don't care about the artist - what's the point?), take them home and clean them, and then re-donate them so at least I know that those records on the rack have been cleaned by me. 

Holy Cow! Bikerbw, you are so virtuous and a better person than I am.  I love that you do this.  I'm too lazy to use my record cleaning machine most times!

I lightly dust the top of my streamer, every time I change playlists........never heard any pops or crackles this way.

I clean every LP whether it was purchased new or used, and then sleeve it in a Mobile Fidelity rice paper sleeve. That's the beauty of US cleaners such as the Klaudio or Audio Desk - they are easy one-button solutions.

Unless you're as dedicated a vinyl cleaner as bikerbw, don't even bother.  Instead, use the extra time saved to polish the knobs on your gear.  Recent studies have shown that dreck, crud, grime and blueberry jam are readily transferred via several pathways to our vinyl. Interesting though, that blueberry jam actually seemed to improve the PRAT on some LPs.