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

BTW the ONLY reason you are told to balance the tonearm before setting tracking force is to be able to set the dial on the tonearm to zero so you can use it to set tracking force.  If you use a scale to set tracking force, the settings built into the tonearm are superfluous.

Bill

The Osage Listener Select Brushes are very good.  I have 4 of them.  In fact they were given to me by Jim Pendelton of Osage Audio (thank you again Jim) the maker of AIVS Record Cleaners.

His record cleaning products IMO have no peer, and are the best to be had. 

When cleaning records, don't rush.  Don't try cleaning 2 dozen records at a time in some exhausting marathon session, do a 1/2 dozen, take your time with each, knowing that they were done to the best of your abilities and resources.

+1 @markd51 -I've known Jim for a while, and used to pick his brain on cleaning issues and formulations. His brushes are good. I use the Monks brushes with a Monks Omni but use his #15 with a pure water rinse (I still have several gallons of reagent grade I, which is overkill). 

I also agree that once a method is developed- and everyone has a different approach depending on time, equipment to hand and the condition of a given LP, that one should not try to make a "production" out of it-- I'll do 1/2 a dozen at a time, sometime a few more, running the Monks and a KL. That's usually sufficient at this point, given my intake of "new to me" records, most of which are older pressings. 

Many of my records were originally cleaned 3 or more decades ago on an old VPI-- and in the early days, there were far fewer options in terms of fluids, equipment and the like. 

I think there is a trade-off between effectiveness and convenience and a lot of people lean toward the latter. I only learned how to effectively clean (and did the legwork) once I started buying rare old pressings that, despite high grading, needed help. And learned that a lot of what I had written off as groove damage was simply contamination, often the result of haphazard prior "cleanings" that did more harm than good. Although there is no "magic bullet" I've been able to get virtually all of my records to an extremely high state of play. I'm not buying thrift shop stuff, but when buying old copies, there's a history to each one. I try to adjust my methods to address a particular copy's needs, and use an institutional quality flattener (DF-2, Furutech/Orb) to deal with warps. 

Whoever said that you can only have two out of three--cheap, fast or effective-- is probably correct. I take my time. 

Adding to what I wrote above, and marathon sessions, it factors down to time invested.  My record collection is relatively meager, about 850 LPs with another few dozen oddballs. 

When I bought my VPI 16.5 RCM, and first used it, I then understood this wasn't going to be a month or two project, but many months, and when time allowed. 

I had some good teachers, and again, time was an ingredient to doing a good job. 

You watch these online vids with folks using RCMs, and they're whizzing through and done within a couple minute's time is a fallicy, and in truth, if this is what one does, you're in a way wasting your time because you are not properly cleaning your records.

That you're not allowing enough time for the cleaners to act upon contaminants, to loosen-dislodge them.  They won't be removed. 

No matter what, one will always see cruds accumulate upon a stylus, just a fact of life.  But you can lessen such with good practices and better handling of your vinyl, it is one facet to stellar playback.

Thank you all, I have so far made some serious progress on my vinyl listening sessions, thank you! Cleaning, with a deeper brush on a wet surface, and vacuuming less, seemed to help quite a lot. 

And getting the right scale to measure exactly 1.7 tracking force made a gigantic difference, it think when my bro in law set it up before it was way off. 

And will be tweaking the anti skate today, I believe moving where the weight hangs on the little black outrigger is the way to do it. 

thank you all,

r.