7-2025

Advice on Cleaning Your Favorite Records

The Prelude Record Cleaning System Is Now Available

One of our customers wrote to us about cleaning his collection not long ago:

I plan to clean all 300-400 records I really care about. I mean they’ve never been cleaned.

Do you think that’s a waste in any way? I imagine any record will sound better throughly cleaned with the Prelude system. They have never been cleaned.

Maybe half these records were only pressed at one plant when they first came out, one run. They weren’t re-released until the world caught up 20 years later.

Andrew

Dear Andrew,

My general view is that it requires an enormous commitment to clean that many records.

Here is what I would consider a more realistic approach:

You have 300-400 records you want to clean. Every time you play one of these records, put it in an area on your record shelf that is strictly for records you have just played.

When you get to ten of those records, sit down and clean them. If you are using our approach, this will take between two and three hours.

For one reason or another, some of the records you own will simply never be played again. Unless they are going to get played, why clean them?

Clean the ones you know you will want to play because you’ve just played them!

If you have 1000 records, 900 or more are unlikely to get played in any given year. Maybe they won’t get played for another five years. As we said above. some may never get played again.

And yet you want to take the time to clean them now? Doing three an hour? How far to you think you will get with that project?

If you are like everyone I know who has talked about doing such a thing, you will not get far. It’s a lot of work.

Tastes change and evolve. That’s a good thing, not a bad one.

And when you find a new record you love after just having played it and can hardly wait to hear it again, make sure it gets put at the front of the queue to be cleaned. At some point you will have ten in the queue, and you can then set up a block of time to clean your ten great records.

Over the coming weeks you will look forward to playing them again, if for no other reason than to hear how much better they sound now.

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Which Album by The Who Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

We think Tommy has the best Who sound.

I don’t know of another Who album with such consistently good sound — song to song, not copy to copy of course. Just about every song on here can sound wonderful on the right UK pressing.

If you’re lucky enough to get hold of a killer copy, you’re going to be blown away by the Tubey Magical guitars, the rock-solid bottom end, the jumpin’-out-of-the-speakers presence and dynamics, and the silky vocals and top end.

Usually the best we can give you for The Who is big and rockin’ (Who’s Next, Live at Leeds), but on Tommy, we can give you 60s analog magic you will rarely find in the decades to follow.

Killer Acoustic Guitars

Acoustic guitar reproduction is key to this recording, and on the best copies the harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard in every strum.

What do high grades give you for this album? Silky, sweet vocals; huge weight to the bottom end; “you are there” immediacy; BIG drums, off the charts rock and roll energy, and shocking clarity and transparency.

No other Who album in our experience has all these things in such abundance.

The Tubey Magic Top Ten

You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amount of Tubey Magic that exists on this recording. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Tommy.

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Suite Espanola – How Do the Remastered Pressings Sound?

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

In 2011 we made the (usually pointless) effort to compare a London pressing to the 180 gram Speakers Corner reissue which we were carrying at the time. We noted simply that the Heavy Vinyl pressing “was a joke next to this copy.”

I wish I could tell you in what way it was a joke — we try to be specific about the shortcomings of these records, which is why we publish our notes for some of them — but the old notes are long gone.

Naturally, we don’t have the reissue to play this time around. Still, we are confident that the results of any comparison would be the same.

Mark Lehman in the Absolute Sound gave the ORG Heavy Vinyl remastering Five Stars, having this to say about the sound:

ORG’s 45rpm remastering is terrific (as indeed are all of the ORG vinyl reissues I’ve heard). Comparison with the late- 60s London LP on which the Suite first appeared reveals sharpened and clarified attacks and articulations, more tightly focused individual strands, fuller and warmer string choirs, more resonant brass, more pillowy air around flutes, clarinets, and oboes, and more nuance and opulence in the orchestral blends.

The total effect is to make Albeniz’s composition even more sweeping, rhapsodic, richly hued, evocative, and involving—and that’s saying something, considering how good the sonics are on this recording’s first incarnation.

If only any of this were true!

We readily admit we have never played the ORG pressing and have no plans to, but when has a Heavy Vinyl pressing ever had any of the qualities described above, let alone in such abundance?

Never in our experience, and our experience extends to more than four hundred of them.

Enough Already

Enough about records we’ve never played. Let’s discuss some of the pressings of this very recording that we actually have played, it being a favorite of ours for which we have done a number of shootouts.

The Super Analogue remaster from the 90s was awful. I would give it an F if I were grading it today.

The Speakers Corner pressing earned a B grade from us, which makes it one of the better releases on that label. I would guess that one or two out of ten would rate a B. I don’t know of any record of theirs that rates a grade higher than B.

Using letter grades, our grading system of White Hot, Super Hot and Hot would translate to something like A Plus, A and A Minus.

Which means that there is no Heavy Vinyl pressing, from any era, on any label, that should be able to beat any Hot Stamper pressing on our site, and we back that up with a 100% money back guarantee.

UPDATE 2024

Stop the presses and hold your horses.

As of 2024 we actually know of more than one Shootout Winning title pressed on modern Heavy Vinyl. You can read about one of them here.

There is another one as well and we will be writing about that one soon.

We now return you to our old commentary.

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To Find Out How Much Sound You’re Missing, Consider a Different Approach

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

We explain — for free! — how anyone can find better records here.

If you want to know what you’re missing, there is only one approach that allows you to do that.

It involves two things that have made the modern world what it is today:

  1. Empirical findings based on the use of
  2. The scientific method.

Any other approach is doomed, not to failure, but to findings that are neither reliable nor repeatable.

To our knowledge, we are the only record dealers who use rigorously controlled, empirically proven testing procedures to make judgments about the sound quality of the pressings we audition.

That one fact, more than all the others combined — our playback quality, our philosophy, our decades of experience, our skilled listening panels — explains why we are able to offer the discriminating audiophile dramatically better sounding vinyl pressings than anyone else.

As a result of this scientific approach, the exceptional sound quality of the records we sell make it clear to audiophiles exactly what they’ve been missing. (Many have written us enthusiastic letters about sound they could hardly believe.)

Or, put another way, we make clear to them that they did not need to settle for the second- and third-rate sound quality of the Heavy Vinyl pressings they’d been buying because they didn’t know something better was available. (Many have written us letters of the shock they experienced when comparing our Hot Stampers to their audiophile pressings.)

We Didn’t Know Either

We didn’t know how amazingly good so many records could sound until about twenty years ago ourselves.

We found out starting in 2004 when we began doing shootouts.

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons.

The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and noting the differences we heard made us better listeners.

We took our critical listening skills and applied them to tweaking and tuning our stereo and room in order to get as many colorations and limitations out of them as possible.

Through all this work we came to have a better understanding of the fundamentals of collecting better sounding records.

However, without a staff of ten finding, cleaning and playing records, it is the rare audiophile who should expect to be able to duplicate our results.

But they can certainly do a lot better using our approach than any other, an approach that is guaranteed to put them well ahead of all the audiophile reviewers and forum posters in the world combined.

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