Cleaning Vinyl

[Jake]

Last night I went to work ripping some records onto my computer. The basic setup was a borrowed audiophile turntable, an Onkyo reciever (& preamp) with optical digital output hooked up to a Creative Extigy. The bottleneck in sound quality was, of course, the cleanliness of the records themselves.

I looked around the 'net, and the easiest technique I could find for cleaning the records was a 30%/70% solution of isopropyl alcohol and distilled water, with a few drops of mild detergent (I used J&J baby wash), and scrubbing with a lint-free cloth.

Testing it on a crappy record indicated a noticeable improvement in the background hiss. Obviously it didn't remove any of the clicks & pops. But played back later, the ripped tracks still had quite a bit of noise.

Anyone have any good luck with cleaning their LPs? Questions I have are:

1.) Is it worth it to buy commercial cleaning solutions (a search of the net revealed a lot of negative opinions). What about big fancy record cleaning machines?

2.) What's your personal secret recipe for cleaning solutions?

3.) Aside from the solution, what techniques do you use? How hard do you scrub the records?

[funkyfreak]

I use a hand cleaning method of the product below, this is the updated version of their product (mine is near-new from the 70's):

http://www.dbcoopers.com/index_accessories.htm

-FF

[Lawrence]

I do not know model names, but the best LP cleaning comes from machines that spin the record vertically. It hink they immerse the LP into a solution on the downswing and then brush it gently to really deep-clean it. Lots of pops and clicks come from imbedded dirt, not just from scratches: that's why a cosmetically perfect LP can still have pops and clicks.