Michael Fremer | Sep 16, 2020
| First Published: Nov 5, 2005
https://www.analogplanet.com/content/analog-corner-124%E2%80%94all-quiet-vinyl-front
So much has changed in the world of record cleaning, especially with cavitation now available. Still this 15 year old column includes a great deal of useful information. However, much is wrong, especially the claim that all chemical residues used in most fluids are removed with vacuuming. My experience with the Kirmuss restoration system proved that for me-Ed.
Talk to vinyl fanatics about record-cleaning fluids? I’d rather discuss with Rummy the wisdom of invading Iraq, or debate with drug czar John Walters the efficacy of the so-called “war on drugs.” I’d rather talk to a wall. But here I am talking about them, having spent the better part of the summer swimming in the stuff. So many claims are made about how well they clean, and even about how they sound, that I decided a careful survey was in order. Remind me never to do it again.
What prompted this survey was the unearthing of Myles Astor’s article on the subject, published in an issue of the long-defunct magazine Sounds Like . . .. Although I don’t agree with some of Astor’s conclusions, the article is excellent, covering vinyl chemistry and fluid ingredients in admirable detail. I’ll spare you the chemistry, but here’s one of Astor’s conclusions: “[W]hile vinyl appears to be a solid, at the molecular level, it’s porous enough to allow chemical exchanges over time between the record’s surface and its interior.”
All vinyl compounds used for pressing LPs contain, among other ingredients, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyvinyl acetate (PVA), the latter a softer material used as a plasticizer to keep the disc from becoming too brittle. Other ingredients often added to make the final vinyl biscuit include antistatic compounds, as well as coloring agents (carbon-black or dye) to give the naturally clear plastic its usual black color.
While a stylus’s downward tracking force is small—only couple of grams—its footprint is so tiny that the pressure per square inch that it exerts on the groove walls is enormous. Add the buildup of heat due to friction and you can understand why a tiny ridge in a microgroove pressed into a brittle material might crack and break. Hence the plasticizer.
In fact, one cause of the pops and clicks that mysteriously appear on pristine records after only one or two playings is due to impurities in the vinyl compound that break off or pop out under this pressure. (One of the claims made for the LAST preservative, once very popular, was that it bound those impurities to the vinyl’s polymer chain at the molecular level and thus prevented those pops and clicks from occurring.)
Water and isopropyl alcohol can leach plasticizers from vinyl compounds, making them more brittle, but, as Astor pointed out in his piece, in order for that to happen the fluid must be in contact with the record for at least an hour. If you apply fluid and vacuum it off within 30 seconds or a minute, can any plasticizer possibly be leached out? It’s unlikely, unless a residue is left on the record surface. One way to prevent that from occurring is to follow the cleaning with a rinse of distilled water, then another vacuuming. More about water shortly.
Another variable to be reckoned with is mold-release compound—a lubricant added to the vinyl during manufacture or sprayed on the stamper itself to ease the removal of the newly pressed record, and which has a tendency to “cloud” and soften the sound.(NOT TRUE-Ed 2020).
As for the best record-cleaning regimen I know of, regardless of what fluid(s) and applicators you use, see Michael Wayne’sfanatically meticulous article ( https://www.analogplanet.com/content/most-comprehensive-record-cleaning-article-ever-0). Even I don’t have the time, energy, or desire to follow Wayne’s advice to the letter, but I do make use of his insights in caring for my records. I’m sure you’ll find his advice useful as you formulate or update your own.
What we’re trying to remove from the grooves with all this cleaning is dust, fingerprints, mold-release compound, Special Sauce, cigarette ash—and that’s from some brand-new records I’ve cleaned lately. In addition to any or all of that, a used record might have cannabis resin, mucus, semen, blood, urine, sweat, rat droppings, cooking oil, lighter fluid, dishwashing detergent, and—the LP was stored in a wet basement—organic mold. You never can tell what’s on a garage-sale record—people have handled them who were doing G–d knows what at the time. And because records retain static charges that attract all kinds of crap, anything in the world might be lurking in the grooves of your used LPs.
Water, water, everywhere
What’s in modern record-cleaning fluids? Most ready-to-use cleaning fluids are at least three-fourths water. Next, there’s usually some kind of alcohol. Then, in far smaller amounts, a surfactant (detergent), which both breaks down water tension, allowing for easy fluid dispersion, and dissolves (emulsifies) non–water-soluble dirt, which is held in suspension by the liquid so it can be vacuumed off. It’s the detergent that really cleans the record; the alcohol increases the detergent’s action. Some makers of cleaning fluids claim that only an enzymatic cleaner can break down proteins and other organics that can grow in and on fingerprint oils, mold-release compounds, and the like.
H. Duane Goldman, a PhD chemist who’s also known as “The Disc Doctor” (Goldman recently retired and sold his business to Acoustic Sounds), claims that alcohol is used in record-cleaning fluids because of a “lone engineer at the British Museum who was on record as having stated that, following cleaning with methanol-water, he ‘liked the look of the disc.’ ” Goldman went on to tell me that Thomas Edison himself used methanol to clean his Diamond Discs, “to avoid wetting the spindle hole or edges of the disc, as these discs are a layer of phenolic resin over a filler that could absorb water, resulting in swelling and/or cracking of the surface.”
In the 1970s, the early days of consumer-grade record-cleaning machines, mixtures of isopropyl alcohol and water were in vogue. Isopropyl alcohol was used because methanol (methyl alcohol) is highly poisonous, and ethanol (ethyl alcohol) required a tax stamp because it’s the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages. (Don’t drink “denatured” ethyl alcohol or use it to make home-brew record-cleaning fluid; the substances added to it that make it unfit for drinking, such as acetone, will kill you and your records.) But, according to Goldman, while the various alcohols are very effective as wetting agents, for removing mold-release compounds, and helping the detergent component do its job, their efficacy as cleane- is minimal.
Quality counts
Water is heavy. When you buy a ready-to-use record-cleaning fluid, you’re paying for shipping H2O from the fluid manufacturer, to the distributor, to the retailer (if there’s a middle-man), and finally to your door. But you don’t want to be cleaning your records with tap water, which contains all sorts of impurities, including chlorine, heavy metals, pesticide residues, decaying organic matter, and other stuff you don’t want on your records or mix with your cleaning chemicals.Water can be purified by deionization or distillation. You can buy steam-distilled water at the supermarket, and that’s better than tap water, but super-pure, deionized, reverse-osmosis–filtered water is the best kind to use for cleaning records. If you plan on saving money by buying concentrated cleaning fluid and diluting it yourself, visit your local college’s chemistry lab and try to grub some, or buy a reverse-osmosis filter for $135 and make your own. Filterdirect (I’m buying a reverse osmosis filtration system from https://filterdirect.com/). Otherwise, buy a ready-to-use fluid and hope the manufacturer has used distilled water that’s better than supermarket grade.
Some manufacturers are quite open about what they use in their fluids; others won’t say. Record Research Labs, Audiotop, and L’Art Du Son’s are teetotalers. Of the manufacturers who use alcohol, most use isopropyl, of which there are various grades of purity. Audio Intelligent (http://www.osageaudio.com/) for instance, uses laboratory-grade isopropyl for its Record Cleaning Formula.
Goldman uses “analytical reagent grade,” 99.5%-pure 1-proponol in his two Disc Doctor fluids because he claims that isopropyl alcohol “has the greatest potential for removing various additives and extenders from the vinyl matrix.” He also claims that isopropyl alcohol is a poor solvent for stearic acid and its salts, which he says are the most common mold-release agents used in vinyl. Based on my experience, I’d say that unless you’re leaving fluid on the record for more than an hour, I’d be more concerned about the grade of the alcohol used than how the molecules are arranged (isoproponol is also known as 3-proponol), though isopropyl’s efficacy as a remover of mold-release compound does create another issue.
I didn’t talk to every manufacturer, but no one with whom I did speak specified the surfactants they used. Goldman says he uses a “carefully tweaked blend of ionic surfactants” in his standard fluid, and “non-ionic” in his Quick Wash. Audio Intelligent’s Paul Frumkin says that, along with using high-quality ingredients, the key to an effective cleaning solution is the proportion of those ingredients.
Now what do I do?
There I sat, staring at fluids from Audio Intelligent, Disc Doctor, Record Research Labs, Audiotop, L’Art du Son, VPI, Nitty Gritty, Bugtussel, LAST, Lyra, a guy named Brotman, and some old Torumat, vintage 1986, which I bought when I lived in Los Angeles and can’t bring myself to pour down the drain. But you should know that the shelf life of these products is finite, so don’t stock up. Some last longer than others; a year or so is a safe bet. With most of them, if you see sediment at the bottom of the bottle, it’s time to replace.
The mesmerizing singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens had United’s Nashville pressing plant send me five test pressings of his latest double LP, Illinoise (Asthmatic Kitty), to get my approval before the press run. I felt honored. I played an uncleaned side, then cleaned each side of each set’s first disc with a different fluid, for a total of 10 fluids. Then I listened.
What did that prove? Scientifically, nothing—there’s no way to scientifically compare these fluids. Once you clean a record with one fluid, cleaning it with another doesn’t allow you to fairly compare the two—the second fluid tested benefits from an already clean record. You could reverse the process on the other side, but each side of a record is different. And you know what? Press 10 copies of a record from the same stamper and each can sound slightly different. Still, I cleaned and listened—I wanted to hear the album a few times anyway.
I wasn’t listening to hear which record cleaner “sounded better.” I think anyone who says that fluids “sound” different is delusional. If you put any cleaning fluid on a record and vacuum it all off, the only sonic difference can be the absence of dirt or residue, not the addition of a “sonic signature” from a nonexistent substance. That can be significant if a particular fluid removes crud and noise no other fluid managed to do, but it doesn’t mean you’re “hearing” the fluid. The only time you’ll “hear” a cleaning fluid is when you haven’t removed all of it, or when it’s designed to leave behind a residue, such as a lubricant. If you think otherwise, please write and tell me how a piece of vinyl’s intrinsic sound can be changed by pouring fluid on it, scrubbing it, then sucking all the fluid off.
I played side 1 of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise, then cleaned it and played it again. There was definitely greater focus and clarity, probably because most of the dirt and mold-release compound had been removed. Cleaning it again, with another fluid, made no difference that I could hear. Nor did playing the 10 cleaned sides back to back reveal any sonic differences. All 10 sides had occasional pops and ticks that no amount of follow-up cleaning could eliminate.
Do all of these fluids remove mold-release compound with equal effectiveness? I don’t know—I don’t have an electron microscope. But I used each fluid to clean a different brand-new LP that I played once before cleaning, and every disc sounded better after being cleaned: quieter and better focused. Machine-cleaning new records is as important as cleaning old ones.
I applied all of these fluids, as directed, to many other records over a period of two months, using inexpensive nylon brushes to avoid cross-contamination whenever a cleaning fluid did not come with
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