Humminguru record cleaner

Welcome to the ultrasonic club.

Is this Shaklee Stuff really OK to use on LPs?  I question household cleaners on vinyl, just out of principle, not out of experience. 

@vinylshadow I have a PRC-4 Deluxe, and it does most of the work. My Degritter is the icing on the cake, as it were. I use L'Art du Son with it (sometimes AI Enzyme Formula when needed) and use the Degritter now with plain distilled water. That gives the final rise whilst the transducers take off any remaining crud. So my experience suggests that a Humminguru would be a good addition to your Loricraft, but probably not a replacement.

There are any number of decent ways to clean a record. I am beginning to think it depends more on the fluid than anything else. The problem is how the record is dried. This is an instance where the original record cleaners were well researched. They all used vacuum drying for a very good reason. The air is full of pollution. It is so full that evolution has given animals an amazing system for filtering it out, mucous and cilia. Without that system by the time we were one decade old our lungs would be totally trashed. For those of you with forced hot air heating or AC what does your filter look like after 6 months, a year. Now imagine that in your lungs. Now imagine that on your records. The fluid traps the dust, then you fan or air dry the record evaporating the water, leaving the pollution on the record. Once a record is wet it has to be vacuum dried, removing everything from the surface. I do not know of an ultrasonic machine that vacuum dries the record, the format makes vacuum drying impossible to do at anything approaching a reasonable cost. I think the Nessie is the best value in a vacuum record cleaning machine. Cleaning with a fine brush or microfiber pad and a good fluid is just as effective as ultrasonic cleaning with the advantage of vacuum drying with any number of machines making the entire process more effective than any ultrasonic machine. 

I thing that people who notice a stunning improvement in sound quality after cleaning a record either have extraordinarily filthy records or they are subject to expectation bias. Many people are disappointed when a record is just as noisy after cleaning. You clean your records to prevent them from becoming trashed, once they are they are rubbish fodder.  

FWIW, ultrasonic stylus cleaners are not “ultrasonic”, if you define it as beyond range of hearing. They operate at about 500 Hz.

I once compared US cleaning to cleaning with my VPI HW17, using DI water, alcohol, and TX100 in the VPI. I used a familiar recording by Johnny Hartman. The US machine was on demo at the CAF in DC, and the owner cleaned the LP with his machine at the show. I could hear no significant difference between the two methods, both excellent.