Stylus cleaners

@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.

Totally agree with above comment from tablejockey. I have been using the Magic Eraser sponge for many years now to clean my stylus'. Under a microscope they show no signs of wear and still look brand new. I will follow up occasionally with a stylus brush to clean the debris from the cantilever. I steer clear of any wet cleaners.

I use BluTack at the recommendation of SoundSmith (who rebuilt my B&O MMC20CL cartridge). It works very well if you use it like the "Onzo" product. 

I like to pull the cartridge and check it under a microscope every couple of months and do a deeper cleaning with distilled water.... Even when there is something that looks like tar on the "front" of the stylus that the BluTack didn't remove, all that I've ever needed is a bit of distilled water on a stylus brush to get it clean.