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

+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.

@whyrichard 

Unless somebody has spilled congealed porridge or an equivalent on your records, I think you are mainly dealing with dust attracted by electrostatic forces to the vinyl.

Any time you rub vinyl with an insulated material, electrons are displaced.  The insulated material can be cat fur, velvet, paper or even in my opinion the diamond stylus.

According to Wilson Benesch, details down to one micron can be retrieved from the groove.  That’s a thousandth of a millimeter.  No brush can get that deep.

Electrostatic forces are incredibly powerful and like gravity obey an inverse square law in distance.  At one micron, the force is a million times stronger than at one millimeter.  The best way to unstick the dust is to discharge the electrons and wetting with water is a great way to do that - see Anton’s excellent book entitled Precision Aqueous Cleaning of Vinyl Records available free here: PACVR-3rd-Edition.

I believe that once the electrons have been freed, the best way to release the microscopic dust is with a no-contact ultrasonic cleaner.  I use a relatively cheap Chinese one before I play new records, as well as on all used records.  The secondhand records I buy in general are as click-free as new records, but they are mostly classical and have probably been well looked after by previous owners.

I do use micro-line stylii which tend to read parts of the groove that have not been worn by conical, elliptical or Shibata stylii.

I follow Anton’s advice and use deionised water plus wetting (Polysorbate 20) and drying (Ilfoton) agents, and air dry the cleaned records vertically in a rack which came with the ultrasonic cleaner.  No rubbing!  I replace the inner sleeves with anti-static ones from Nagaoka and use an AudioQuest conducting carbon-fibre brush recommended by TAS.

A while ago I was ridiculed for pointing out how much stronger electrostatic forces are than gravity.  Electromagnetic forces are hugely bigger than gravitational forces – about 36 orders of magnitude greater.  While you can flick away surface dust (gravity deposited) with a feather duster, electromagnetically bound dust sticks very firmly

I noticed a significant improvement going from wet-vacuum to UltraSonic followed by Vacuum, then air dry. Particularly the sonic so-called "black background". At detergent concentrations in record cleaners, with removing most residual water-detergent by vacuum, there is no need for distilled water. I calculated it out, and there are scattered molecules of detergent on the record surface, so we are talking a few Angstrom (10-10 m) here or there so a far cry from micrometers/microns/µm (10-6 m) resolvable by stylus. A difference of 10+4 or 10,000.

If you don't vacuum and just air dry, then a DI rinse *may* be advisable as the water evaporates leaving detergent (and residual dirt) behind. Have not calculated that and even wonder whether that is justifiable. 

Notice that the calculation in the record cleaning book are flawed as it goes from mass/weight to thickness without including density/specific gravity (6/0.5x12, particularly at value around 1 or 1/1=1). That's why those calculations are off by a factor of around 20K. I provided the back of the envelope math in a previous post. No need to sweat a few percent here or there when we are talking four orders of magnitude, give or take.

Additionally, tendency for static is highly location dependent. I have zero problems with it, don't have an antistatic gun or anything like that.