I

came into hi-fi in the early 1970s,

right at the peak of quadraphonic

sound. Vinyl was the only way to lis-

ten to music recordings with quality

(except for those lucky few with ac-

cess to a reel-to-reel tape machine).

But it was often a depressing scene.

A new record, straight from the shop, often

suffered from surface noise. Sometimes noise

just seemed to appear magically on a record

despite one’s greatest care.

This was at a time when I’d earn a little

over six dollars a week for eight hours work,

and an LP cost around six dollars. As I said,

depressing. When digital rolled around a dec-

ade later, I was one of the first to roll up with

$1,200 1984 dollars in hand to buy a Sony

CDP-101. Say what you like about digital

sound quality, it’s devoid of clicks and pops

and play-by-play degradation.

Unfortunately, I then embarked on what

I called my Great Vinyl Replacement Project.

That involved buying the CD version of

all my albums. That wasn’t a bad idea. The

unfortunate part was that I then felt able to

trade in the vinyl versions. Young family, not

much money and all that.

Still, I retain quite a few records from

those days. And nostalgia and curiosity (and

the opportunity to review a couple of turnta-

bles) has had me delving into the glories and

disasters of vinyl again in recent years.

At first I was hopeful. Most new albums

that you can buy these days—and re-issues

of old albums—come on heavier-duty vinyl

than in the past, and since a proportionately

larger part of the market are likely to be audio

enthusiasts, I figured that that all new LPs

would be premium products, beautifully and

carefully produced.

Certainly the covers look that way. But

the vinyl? The very first new album I played

had some very nasty, very loud pops on one

track. Another brand new album made the

stylus skip on the first track. Closer inspec-

tion revealed that what looked like a fibre

on the surface was actually a thread of glue.

Fortunately it dislodged when I worked on it

with a stylus brush. There turned out to be

similar defects on all four sides.

Not all that much had changed, it seems,

these past four decades.

So, what to do?

Perhaps a bit of cleaning could help. Fash-

ions in cleaning vinyl have swung this way

and that over the decades. Back before I got

into hi-fi, our family three-in-one had a ‘dust

bug’. Remember those? That kept some of the

dust and dirt out, but couldn’t do anything

to protect the vinyl from the 10 gram track-

ing weight of the ceramic stylus.

Once I bought my own better-quality

equipment, I went with a DiscWasher and

three or four drops of cleaning fluid for

each play. The DiscWasher was a cleaning

brush with the fibres intended to go into the

groove, pointing against the direction of mo-

tion. Later I moved to a carbon fibre brush,

which of course you use dry. But all that was

for maintenance.

What do to about noise already built up?

Was it damage to the groove? Ingrained dirt?

Could I fix the noise in my records?

How could you clean them? In my youth

various theories about record cleaning swirled

around the hi-fi community. ‘Yes’ said some.

‘No’ said others. ‘If you make your LPs damp,

then they’ll be attacked by fungus and truly

become damaged.’ ‘Fooey!’,said others. So I just

stuck with my modest, pre-play cleaning ritual.

But now, after a few decades of mostly

digital media listening, I am strangely more

Stephen Dawson compares four different systems

for cleaning LP records, one of them all-Australian

and one of them super high-tech!

60 Australian Hi-Fi ŘˁʊǒǔǞƖƋɁȧ