Record Cleaner Advice?

Yes....there is a sonic difference, but too much of a Pia for me.   I have a Nitty Gritty that I use occasionally.   I use a brush before playing....

@lxgreen - your response raises a number of good issues, none of which are confined to the Nitty Gritty machine. One is multiple cleaning methods and steps, which I have found to be synergistic. Despite your delight with the results of the Degritter, you may want to keep your Nitty Gritty around as a pre-cleaner for records that aren’t effectively cleaned with an ultrasonic process.
The other issue is whether you want to use a surfactant as part of the ultrasonic cleaning process. We are told (and have seen photos showing) that the surfactant in the bath enhances the cavitation process by lowering the surface tension of the bath water.
The question then becomes how one effectively removes the residue of that surfactant in completing the cleaning process. Forced air drying will not do so; I had that experience when I owned the AD and could see how records cleaned with it exhibited a different behavior when wetted than a record that had not been run through the AD.
This suggested to me that some surfactant remained on the record surface, though frankly, I never heard a sonic signature from it. (I used little more than a capful of the AD fluid, rather than a whole bottle, based on comments from some early adopters).

I know the Degritter allows you to change out water containers which means you could conceivably clean with a surfactant, then change the water "cartridge" to a "pure" water container for a rinse cycle-- but that "pure" water bath is going to get polluted pretty quickly with surfactant residue.
Distilled water is certainly cheap enough in the States to enable you to change out the water constantly, but you’d probably have to clean the inner walls of that container (and Lord knows what the innards involve in terms of removing any surfactant traces from the inside of the machine itself).
Am I being a bit anal about this? Sure. One solution is to finish the record using pure water and a vacuum process, but the Nitty Gritty may not be conducive to that.
I also wonder if not doing a "pure" water rinse step when you were using only the Nitty Gritty resulted in less than satisfactory results- that is, there was residue of the cleaning solution along with other contaminants (that you were trying to remove) that were still bound to the record surface.
Good luck with your Degritter- in the current market, that seems like the unit to go for "one button" LP cleaning. I’ve only heard good things about the unit, including from @albertporter, a longtime Audiogon member who has owned and used virtually every high end RCM.
I’m still thinking of a design for an industrial level ultrasonic that might accomplish it all for less than 10k Dollars. :) In the meantime, we soldier on.
Bill Hart

When you are using surfactants for the final clean step, and you are not going to do a final rinse, you can do it, but the surfactant and its concentration has to be near perfect to get a near residue-free surface.  In my discussion above, 0.01% tergitol which is equal to 100 ppm (or 100 mg/L) will achieve a surface tension of 30 dynes/cm.  If  you were to leave 2 mL on the surface to dry, you would leave a residue of 0.2 mg which is essentially insignificant.   Now this assumes a clean tank, but most good DIY setups are filtering the tank.

But, if you are using who knows what at  who knows what concentration, you are asking for trouble if you are not going to rinse.

This has been quite a technical tour de force.  One surprise is the respect the old Nitty Gritty units still garner.

It has me wondering if I should do my deep cleaning with my old NG 1.5 (using Tergitol or distilled water) and acquire a VPI 16.5 or 17 for pre-listening treatments.  (I don't care about noise during cleaning.)

None of this would be ultrasonic, but would it do the job?  Also, would I still need an anti-static brush?

@keegiam,

The disadvantage with the NG 1.5 is that you cannot work the surface of the record with cleaner/brush and this is noted in this review comparing it to a VPI  Record cleaning machines - Clearaudio Smart Matrix, Nitty Gritty 1.5 and VPI HW 16.5 [English] (tnt-audio.com).  The benefit of the VPI (and similar units) is that you can apply steps as follows:

1.  Pre-clean dirty records with say Alconox Liquinox at 0.5% - vacuum but do not fully dry.
2.  Rinse pre-cleaner with DIW  - vacuum, but do not fully dry.
3.  Final clean with say Tergitol 15-S-9 at 0.05% - vacuum and do not fully dry.
4.  Rinse final cleaner with DIW - vacuum and fully dry.

There is manual labor with using a brush - I like the Record Dr bursh  Amazon.com: Record Doctor Clean Sweep Brush: Home Audio & Theater - you can use one brush - just rinse with water after each cleaner use (it can be tap water); and there is some technique - you have to work the brush and cleaner.  Will it do the job, yes and more than likely better than ultrasonics because you are using a multi-step process with fresh cleaner and rinse water for each step.  Something like the Degritter is convenient and easy to use with no manual labor, but as single step machine it has limitations. 

Once the record is deep wet cleaned, if you take reasonable care, store in an antistatic sleeve, there should be no reason to clean again.  Static is something you cause.  You can use an anti-static brush - but only just touch the record surface and the brush and you need a path to ground (touch something metal that is grounded).  Otherwise, I use no brushes, just a swipe with the Kinetronics anti-static tiger cloth  Amazon.com: Kinetronics Anti-Static Microfiber Cloth, 10x18-Inch Tiger Cloth: Camera & Photo  to remove surface particles.