So a thing happened. I had a bit of a revelation, crossed with major frustrations with the vinyl accumulating and no easy way to clean them.
My old process was to run three records on a Vinyl Stack gizmo, which sits the records in an ultrasonic tank. Following that, they would get moved to the record vacuum for a rinse with purified water. (Harry Weisfeld of VPI follows the same method, although his ultrasonic tank and vacuum were of higher quality.) It...worked. Certainly better than wet vacuuming alone, but still wasn't completely satisfied with the results. Not only that, it's cumbersome to haul all these parts up from the basement in three trips, take over the entire dining area of the kitchen, and put up with the incessant noise of both the ultrasonic cleaner and the vacuum. I dreaded cleaning records, and couldn't afford the major chunk of time I needed to clean them all.
I'd seen other all-in-one solutions, but there was something about the Degritter that appealed to me. While it's designed to clean records (duh), it was also designed to make record cleaning as easy as possible. Easy, as in stick the record in thetoaster slot, press a button, and walk away with a clean record shortly thereafter.
It does have a handful of settings that can be adjusted but when they are set, you can clean one record after another with one single press. It's a simple rotation of the right-hand knob to change between the three cleaning levels the machine offers. The water is cleverly filtered after each record--the water and cleaning solution are stored in an outboard tank, pumped into the machine to ultrasonically clean the record, then pumped back into the holding tank after the crud is filtered out. A drying phase runs a fan (with adjustable speed and drying time) so you pull out a record ready to play.
A lot of thought went into the design, and the design of the casing as well as the round LED screen make it attractive, as opposed to looking like a contraption. The cleaner uses four ultrasonic elements, two on each side, to thoroughly cover the surface of the vinyl; it uses a frequency as high as 120kHz, much higher than the others, which creates smaller cavitation bubbles to get deeper in the grooves. (It also uses some frequency sweep, the details of which I'm not fully aware of.)
I'm not alone in admiring this new cleaner. 😉
How do the results sound? Well....clean. 😁 They're cleaner than my old method. I also notice a lack of a very distinct "fuzz" I was hearing with uncleaned records. I rarely buy new vinyl these days, largely due to buying new pressings that are noisy. I tried four recent new purchases, and the Degritter did a great job on three of them; the fourth is probably a pressing defect, as someone else I know with the same record has the same type of noise on Side 2.
Lately, I've mainly been buying sealed new old stock vinyl from the 60s through the 80s, and they all respond well to a good cleaning. A few I've purchased in Near Mint condition have similarly cleaned up well. There are so many now that I want to go back and reclean, just to see if they improve further. I'm sure many of them will. I don't really have anything too gritty anymore, although many of my 12" singles are in jackets and sleeves with the die-cut label openings, and they are prone to getting dusty.
I'm waiting to get a 10" adapter so I can clean those. I have some 7" singles too, but as I rarely play those, I'm not sure if I want to spend the money on the adapter. I'm also willing to play with the cleaning solution a bit. I have some ingredients on hand that I've used for my old cleaning regimen, so I could experiment if I wanted to. But for now I'm using the cleaner supplied with the Degritter.
As a couple of ol' movie critics would have said: Two thumbs up. Way up!
My old process was to run three records on a Vinyl Stack gizmo, which sits the records in an ultrasonic tank. Following that, they would get moved to the record vacuum for a rinse with purified water. (Harry Weisfeld of VPI follows the same method, although his ultrasonic tank and vacuum were of higher quality.) It...worked. Certainly better than wet vacuuming alone, but still wasn't completely satisfied with the results. Not only that, it's cumbersome to haul all these parts up from the basement in three trips, take over the entire dining area of the kitchen, and put up with the incessant noise of both the ultrasonic cleaner and the vacuum. I dreaded cleaning records, and couldn't afford the major chunk of time I needed to clean them all.
I'd seen other all-in-one solutions, but there was something about the Degritter that appealed to me. While it's designed to clean records (duh), it was also designed to make record cleaning as easy as possible. Easy, as in stick the record in the
It does have a handful of settings that can be adjusted but when they are set, you can clean one record after another with one single press. It's a simple rotation of the right-hand knob to change between the three cleaning levels the machine offers. The water is cleverly filtered after each record--the water and cleaning solution are stored in an outboard tank, pumped into the machine to ultrasonically clean the record, then pumped back into the holding tank after the crud is filtered out. A drying phase runs a fan (with adjustable speed and drying time) so you pull out a record ready to play.
A lot of thought went into the design, and the design of the casing as well as the round LED screen make it attractive, as opposed to looking like a contraption. The cleaner uses four ultrasonic elements, two on each side, to thoroughly cover the surface of the vinyl; it uses a frequency as high as 120kHz, much higher than the others, which creates smaller cavitation bubbles to get deeper in the grooves. (It also uses some frequency sweep, the details of which I'm not fully aware of.)
I'm not alone in admiring this new cleaner. 😉
How do the results sound? Well....clean. 😁 They're cleaner than my old method. I also notice a lack of a very distinct "fuzz" I was hearing with uncleaned records. I rarely buy new vinyl these days, largely due to buying new pressings that are noisy. I tried four recent new purchases, and the Degritter did a great job on three of them; the fourth is probably a pressing defect, as someone else I know with the same record has the same type of noise on Side 2.
Lately, I've mainly been buying sealed new old stock vinyl from the 60s through the 80s, and they all respond well to a good cleaning. A few I've purchased in Near Mint condition have similarly cleaned up well. There are so many now that I want to go back and reclean, just to see if they improve further. I'm sure many of them will. I don't really have anything too gritty anymore, although many of my 12" singles are in jackets and sleeves with the die-cut label openings, and they are prone to getting dusty.
I'm waiting to get a 10" adapter so I can clean those. I have some 7" singles too, but as I rarely play those, I'm not sure if I want to spend the money on the adapter. I'm also willing to play with the cleaning solution a bit. I have some ingredients on hand that I've used for my old cleaning regimen, so I could experiment if I wanted to. But for now I'm using the cleaner supplied with the Degritter.
As a couple of ol' movie critics would have said: Two thumbs up. Way up!
