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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