Humminguru Nova

“I recently purchased a bunch of new records and played them without a wash. I’ll test them out after a wash in a Nova.”

@audphile1 You’re IN for a nice surprise. I never play a record without giving it a bath in my Degritter. Even the cleanest new pressings benefit from an ultrasonic wash—it removes pressing residue and microscopic contaminants you may not see, but can certainly hear during playback.

@lalitk 

cool! It arrives tomorrow and I’ll immediately put it to work. 
This new vinyl by Analogue Productions and Craft is amazing I can tell you that much. If cleaning these records improves things further I’ll be a happy camper. 

@pryso I’m having a tough time convincing myself to use a vacuum on a vinyl record. It only takes one rogue hard particle that gets lodged into the vacuum pad to completely ruin a record. I know I’m probably overly paranoid about it but that’s my take on it.

@audphile1 

Analog Productions reissues are, in my experience better than most previous releases. Chad and the team at AP are doing truly fabulous work—between the mastering choices, pressing quality, and overall consistency, their releases often set the benchmark for how reissues should be done. 

@pryso 

A vacuum step can be beneficial depending on the cleaning and drying methods used. The VPI did perform better than either manual cleaning or the Spin-Clean which may be attributed to the vacuum drying step in the VPI.  However, the ultrasonic cleaned record followed with a distilled water rinse and vertical spin drying resulted in the cleanest surface. The important step is spin drying on the spindle assembly in a vertical position. As I stated in my previous post the ultrasonic cleaned surface had between ~95 to 98% contamination removal which corresponds to ~2 to 5% surface contamination remaining. It would be near impossible to remove more contamination with any method unless working in a clean room environment.