Stylus cleaners

Like @Tablejockey posted, Peter Leaderman from Soundsmith told me to form about a 1" column of Blue Tak ( a removeable poster holder) and stick it on a quarter. I keep it between tt plater and tone arm. Just dip stylus down on it a few times before each play. Seems to work fine and very low cost.

I mean no disrespect and I am sure PL knows what he’s talking about but I will not be using blue tak to clean the stylus on my cartridge. 

With all this talk about LAST, I remembered that I have their record treatment. It’s been a while since I used it and in general I can’t say I’m a fan but I picked a noisy pressing, washed it and treated it with LAST. It definitely quiets down the noise slightly and sound is a bit fuller. I should try their stylus cleaner. 

@audphile1 

I've been using LAST stylus cleaner for decades and found it completely reliable. I use LAST's stylus brushes with three swipes from the bottle's applicator perpendicular to the direction of the brush from the stylus back to front at the beginning of every record.

Styluses are mounted differently. Some are glued to a metal shank that is attached to the cantilever. Others are oriented by the shape of the nude diamond shank through the cantilever and crimped with a small drop of epoxy on top of the cantilever to hold it in place. The one's that use unconventional rods or tubes made of beryllium, diamond or boron, the nude diamond shank is oriented and attached to the end of the rod with a fairly large glob of epoxy. These are the ones you have to be especially careful that your stylus cleaner isn't aggressive to the adhesive and cause it to fail. I wouldn't doubt that a stylus mounted this way isn't going to fall of eventually anyway.

Hudson HiFi makes a gadget that they claim is an ultrasonic stylus cleaner.  I don't this it really is but it does work and I use it once a month or so.  I use Stylast before every play of every side of every record and have since the product was introduced.  When I am examining a stylus under a microscope if there is any buildup on it I use LAST Stylus Cleaner to remove same, but that only happens at most once or twice a year.  Actually since starting to use the Hudson thingy I can't remember needing the Stylus Cleaner.  It does a remarkably good job.  BTW, I have it on reliable authority that the juice that comes with the Hudson thingy is distilled water.  One other comment of note is that Stylast does in fact increase the useful life of the stylus.  I wish I had kept better track of hours over the years, but my bad.  Anyway, using it my average stylus life seems to exceed 2,000 hours, using mostly fine line and Shibata these days.  Most of my cartridges track between 1.5 and 2.0 grams.