Record Cleaner won't clean?? Or is it me?

“Velvet lips”, yes, might induce a static charge. That’s not caused by the vacuum. You can do the same by simply rubbing an LP with a velvet cloth. Also, believe it or not, there are vacuum based RCMs that do not use a wand with velvet lips to remove liquid (Loricraft, etc). Those machines don’t induce static charge. I love my VPI HW17, btw.

Also, I never said the VPI brush gets into grooves. I may have implied it’s superior to the Audioquest brush for the purpose of wet cleaning, and I stand by that.

lewm, the Music Hall RCM has a pick up tube with velvet lips much like the VPI machines.  If the OP is over doing the vacuum drying it could be causing static build up.  It might be a factor in his noise issue.  That is all I was saying.  If he was using a Loricraft or a Monks, I would not have mentioned it as a possibility.  You should love your HW17.  I am enjoying the ease of use and effectiveness of mine.  Truth to tell, having used the HW16, HW17 and MW1, they all provide very much the same end result.  The 17 is the easiest to use, the MW1 is more powerful, but unless you work it using 3 brushes, and 3 separate pickup tubes to avoid cross contamination from using strong cleaning, distilled water rinse, intermediate cleaning, another rinse, and then perhaps a final ultra sonic cleaning, the results from the 17 and the MW1 are basically indistinguishable.  What I mean is to achieve a superior result from the MW1 requires extra time and effort.  Too, it would be possible to come close using the 17, all that would be missing is the two direction vacuum, which is not a big deal at all.  Having the MW1 is nice for the big collection I am working on now as it does speed things up somewhat.  The VPI brush is unique and IMHO superior to others I have tried.  I currently have a Record Doctor brush a Sage and a MoFi and three or four VPIs including a brand new one installed yesterday on my 17.

This is just my experience so take it for what it is. 50% of the time I find the noise is caused by my stylus being dirty, which usually is caused by not cleaning a new record or my golden retriever’s hair. 
After cleaning the stylus there’s still noise it goes to the ultrasonic. My experience is even with VPI cleaning there can still be noise which a trip through the ultrasonic corrects. 
I make it a practice to ultrasonic clean all records when I first get them regardless of whether they were previously cleaned or not, that includes new vinyl which can sometimes be the dirtiest. 
i

I love my HumminGuru

I know doesn’t help OP with VPI . Just another option 

Yeah, if you're cleaning records that were likely involved in a few Pizza Parties, quite trashed thrift finds, you can't expect a quick one step process doing much.

As mentioned, no brush gets in the groove, and concur, a CF Anti-Static Brush is the wrong tool for the job at hand.  Get the right stuff needed for wet cleaning. 

Osage, MOFI, Disc Doctor are better choices for brushes to spread-massage cleaners-rinses.

No harm-foul to repeat a cleaning process, or to use a multi-step process. Always do a final pure water rinse. 

@triton20trx +1

I love my Humminguru, also. It's removed noises no other cleaner would. It's not quite a miracle cure, but the closest I've seen yet.