Degritter brand ultrasonic record cleaner

 @whart Thanks so much for referring the Elma.... I need more German stuff in my life :-) I can heartily recommend Brinkmann anything... ha

my manual but hyper trusty Nitty Gritty is fading....

@tomic601 - no problem. If you do go ultrasonic, don’t get rid of your vacuum machine. I find that ultrasonic is not a complete answer with older records that have been exposed to who knows what.
@teo_audio- your comments about the resonant frequency of water fascinated me, so I did some quick and entirely inconclusive reading. There was a fellow named Keely who did some experiments back in the late 19th century experimenting with "etheric forces" and water. There was a mention of a sympathetic frequency a little above 40kHz where water shot through a tube and blew a hole through the roof of his lab!

I think a lot of the information we have about ultrasonic cleaning of records is anecdotal and extrapolated from other fields. I don’t know that anyone has funded any independent research on the subject that has resulted in published papers. I gather that some of the work done by the fellow that developed the AD is considered proprietary.

One person who visited here briefly to discuss ultrasonic cleaning said he measured the frequency of the KL at around 35 kHz, rather than the 40kHz claimed.

One constant seems to be the question of damage- which I have found no evidence of in my use of several different machines. The theory is that the higher frequencies generate smaller, less powerful bubbles which are less likely to cause any pitting. Part of the reason for the spinning of the record is to avoid this sort of damage, though I have not tried to damage a record deliberately using ultrasonic machines.
I think the days of major companies funding research in these areas is long gone-- there is little economic incentive to do so and most of the companies in the market in the record cleaning space are small operations, or are using US baths that are designed for industrial use, not necessarily for cleaning records, e.g. Elma, who make equipment for labs, dental and medical, industrial applications, etc.

I use the Nitty Gritty enzyme cleaner for the more difficult discs, seems to help
i will add that as a pre-clean step IF I go US

what a sometimes strange, esoteric and archane hobby we have....

@whart which model Elma and size tank do you recommend? Thanks so much!

@whart ..
so you came across Jerry Decker’s keeleynet. Which he’s abandoned, probably due to his health. Jerry’s been at it since before the net existed. One of the original scientific oddity data websites and collections, it is. It is slowly fading and the loss of his collection is a great loss to the searchers on the edge of the herd. Those that are by definition the edge of change itself. Reading such oddity websites is what takes a person to being, via finding those chestnuts of data within..can put one 10-20-50 years ahead of anyone else, in some aspects of scientific knowledge. Critical when it comes to putting things together into a framework that works in the now.

In there, when you get past the strange and obsessive ’guardians of the scientific laws’ (don’t look! they scream, with all that agitated hand waving) when you get past the illiterate clams that all they don’t know is foo... then you can get into all the interesting edge phenomena that are indicating where to go and look in emergent science.

Eg, what you just found from nearly 100 years ago, as some sort of grandiose crazy story would be normally delegated by the spitty foo claimers as being a charlatan’s tale ----is actually something that became connected to a real thing, but nearly 100 years later.

This happens a thousand times over. Check the record, to note it when you come across it. And it will happen again --a thousand times more. Thus, logic says, look to the edge and into the darkness, as the middle of the herd..has nothing. Nothing at all.

So ignore all the naysayers and forge ahead. And when they confront you in their self appointed fiefdom of comfort, safety, dogma, and so on, those ’halls of laws and negativity in science’ (Eg engineering..which is given as dogma, for specific reasons), gently push them by the head into a wall so you can say ’excuse me’ and step past their weird negative space ranting. They are psychologically knotted up, and it’s not going to go away. Part of the condition of being in a herd and not knowing the self....

The thing is.. they will all gang up and beat one to death in the public interweb streets for looking at and playing with data they don't understand..but not a single one will appear and show some humanity and chagrin, when they are shown to be wrong. Such is my repeated experience for decades.

And move on to real science (which is by design all theory), which comes from the new and the strange, the oddities and the observations. Always has, always will.

Textbooks are for telling you where the norm of the now is, in the historical sense. Read them and relate and note, but then it’s all on you to throw the textbook over your shoulder..and step out to find the new. The map is not the territory.