Record Cleaning Machine Fluid

"My experience is that AIVS went too far. Its rinsability is clearly inferior to RRL's. It left audible residue that took multiple rinse/vac cycles to remove. That is why I bring it out for hardship case LP's only. In our experience RRL (+ Vinyl Zyme) is the better performing product. YMMV of course, but I didn't want anyone believing that "beading up" is a downside with RRL. It's not. It's a carefully selected design feature."

1. It is my understanding, Doug, that your experience with AI was limited to the beta testing period, and the formulas have been greatly refined and improved since then. I believe we talked about this a few months ago.

2. Out of all the audiophiles who have used AI, only three ever complained of difficulty in rinsing it. When M. Fremer did his shoot-out, he personally called me and said AI could remove grunge and things no other product could, and that he detected NO sonic signature at all.

Also, Jim Pendleton and his company Osage Audio recently became the sole distributor for the AI products. As part of his due diligence, Jim had an experienced chem lab check the LPs after they had been cleaned using the AI three-step process. The chem lab found NO residue.

3. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to claim that a water-based product's beading-up is a "carefully selected design feature" because beading-up is a natural property of water that contains no surfactant. It's like saying that canned air has oxygen as a carefully selected design feature.

Almost all water-based cleaners employ a surfactant so the product doesn't just sit on the surface of the thing being cleaned. A cleaner using water's natural surface tension cannot easily be forced to enter tight spaces, such as a groove on a vinyl album. How much of a vertical distance is there from the surface of a record to the bottom of its grooves? 1/32 inch? Less? If your RCM can remove liquid on the surface of a record, but cannot suck it out of the grooves, the RCM suffers from an astouding lack of suction power, and surely then the results are RCM-dependent.

Psychicanimal ... you know more about water quality than just about anyone here, so I assume your reference to soap was just a slip of the tongue. There is no soap in any AI product.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Best regards to all,
Paul Frumkin

Doug, I've not found a product yet which everyone prefers to all others. Having a choice is a great thing, and I support your having a preferred brand. I do not doubt that RRL is a good product that many people like.

To suggest that a little company like Audio Intelligent is seeking a monopoly is plain silly and far beneath your intelligence level. And yea for your Loricraft, but I don't have a VPI. I built my own RCM--it's identical to the one I built for John Grado. The suction power of an RCM is highly relevant to a discussion of how well cleaning fluids are removed from vinyl; it's no red herring, as you suggest.

Doug, if you followed the beta testing thread, then you know that I experimented first with various products, and then with the ratios of the best products, for more than three years before offering the beta product for testing. To say I relied on beta testers to make the product is therefore quite misleading.

I have never denied that three people, including you, didn't like the product; this is not the first time I've acknowledged that, and you know it. But BFD, Doug (see the second sentence, above). I'm sorry if my citing Fremer's experience upset you. But the fact is that every reviewer has liked the product, and most have said it's the best they've ever tried. And by the way, how would you know whether no audiophile ever complained about RRL's rinseability? That's an absurd statement. However, I do think you should continue stating that three people didn't like the Audio Intelligent products. Out of what is approaching 1,000 sales, that's the best advertising I can think of.

Finally, you mention that I'm a lawyer and suggest that, on that basis, the products were not properly chemically engineered. Actually, I'm a research lawyer, and in my nearly 28 years in the practice, I've had to learn a number of technical fields of study. Perhaps on a more basic level, have I ever suggested that you don't know much because you buy furniture for a living?

Peace, brother,
Paul