perer-letter

Our Advice Has Been Followed and the Results Are In

Proper Record Cleaning Can Help You Find Your Own Hot Stamper Pressings

One of our customers wrote to us about cleaning his collection not long ago, and we advised him how he should go about it. He seems to have taken much our advice to heart and has quieter, better sounding records as a result. He did not spring for the pricey Keith Monks style machine we use, but felt that his efforts produced excellent results regardless. Best to hear it from him:

Hey Tom,

Just did three records, in all different conditions, and this one Eddie Palmieri, the Latin Salsa pioneer. And I had been meaning to get some famous albums in that genre, and I looked through Discogs.com and this guy wanted $40 for an album called Mozambique. Even though it looked great, it had so much noise from years of build up.

It played beautifully after all the steps. There was a huge jump in fidelity, just the tiniest, tiniest surface noise between songs. You wouldn’t notice if you weren’t listening for it.

From the other two records which had different issues, I don’t think it’s very hard to understand what else a Keith Monk type machine might add to other more difficult records, in combination with the Prelude stuff and a VPI. But for this one, and I think a lot of other records I own, the Prelude and VPI are all I needed.

I know there’s going to be a huge learning curve and I don’t expect things to be so simple. But it was just cool and kind of a treat, my first time out, to know that it’s possible.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that for what it’s worth. Thanks,

Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Glad to hear you were able to get your records cleaner and make them better sounding to boot. What could be better?

Well, there actually is an answer to that rhetorical question, and we supplied it right here on the blog in a listing with step by step instructions using the Prelude Record Cleaning System and two record cleaning machines. You asked me to write it all out so that’s what I did.

It does not surprise me in the least that you got great results with your VPI. That is the very machine we had been using since the early-90s to clean all our records. Sometime later in the decade we discovered the Disc Doctor fluids and switched to them. I wrote a long piece in my paper catalog (this was in our pre-internet days) discussing how much quieter and better sounding all of our vintage classical records sounded when cleaned with DD fluids, and that I was therefore going to reclean them all and reevaluate every last one for sound and surfaces. It was that big a difference.

In 2007, when I first heard a record cleaned with the Prelude System, everything changed radically, a story I tell using the record I was testing at the time, Meddle. It was one of the biggest breakthroughs we had experienced up to that time.

This is the kind of difference you have now heard with Prelude and your 16.5. You are operating at a different level now.

But there was more to come for us when an audio friend invited me to bring a record over that he would clean with Prelude on his Keith Monks machine. I brought over a killer copy of Meddle as I recall. Imagine my shock when it sounded even better than it had when first cleaned with Prelude. I immediately ordered up a industrial-strength threaded-pickup machine, the Odyssey, made in Germany, and started offering Hot Stamper pressings that were quieter and had better sound than I had ever heard before. (We are currently on our third unit. We clean a lot of records.)

This is leap you have yet to take. It might not make as much difference as your cleaning has to date, but, once you do it, you will find that there is a clearly audible “before and after” quality to the sound of your records. No doubt you will want to reclean all your personal favorites using Prelude and whatever Keith Monks type machine you end up with.

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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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Letter of the Week – “The consistent results you’ve given me has turned this into a certifiable hobby that I can really enjoy.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

 Hi Tom,

I just bought a copy of Rubber Soul from you which sounds amazing. That will cover all the most important Beatles records I have to have on hand. (Beatles for Sale, Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Yellow Submarine) that I can afford right now anyway.

Coming across your blog and business has been such a game changer. If I hadn’t run into you, I would just not understand why some records sound amazing, and others don’t and why it matters to clean them (even if brand new), and how to clean them really well.

(Even if I had understood the importance of cleaning them, you’re the only one who cracked the system to get them cleaner than anyone else by a mile. You really figured it out then shared how to clean them. I have my VPI device just waiting on the labels and packaging so I can clean the records most important to me. )

The consistent results you’ve given me has turned this into a certifiable hobby that I can really enjoy. No more mystery as to how this all works, why some records sound amazing and why some records are mediocre despite being an original pressing that cost a lot and appear clean, yet sound mediocre. I appreciate you sharing your 20 years of research and knowledge. This whole thing wouldn’t work without you generously sharing your hard won knowledge.

Andrew,

Thanks for your letter.

Yes, it does indeed all make sense if you don’t listen to a word the self-styled experts of the record world say.

If you play enough records for long enough, eventually you learn something, and we did!

Good to hear that your musical enjoyment has benefited. That is what it is all about.

Best, TP

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Letter of the Week – How Good Are Record Cleaning Services?

The Best Record Cleaning System We Know of Is Now Available

One of our customers thought he would try a record cleaning service to get some of his records cleaned. Here is what he found.

Hi Tom,

I got my first set of records back from the cleaning service. Very disappointing.

I’m being totally straight when I say you have set a new standard for what I expect a clean record to sound like. As soon as I heard the pressing of Sticky Fingers, and all subsequent records I bought from you, I realized it was possible to get old records really clean. Almost flawlessly clean like a CD I want to say. The sounds on the record are clearer but so are the littlest tiny pops in the groove. I don’t know what you call them to distinguish them from bigger pops, [we call them ticks] but you can hear them so clearly on quiet passages and between songs and really through the song except the loudest parts.

I know not all vinyl is dead quiet but there are few records from the 1980s I took very good care of and hadn’t played very much that they should have been able to get much much cleaner in my opinion. And the record’s surface is perfect to the eye, so I’m guessing it’s their cleaning methods. All the records have the same defect cleaning wise, except the brand new record I sent. That sounds better than it did and is crystal clear. Overall, no bueno.

Your records were way way better. I guess I’m going to have to get that particular solution system you recommended. Do I need that $4000 German machine to do it right after that? Or are there other ultrasonic cleaners worth investigating? I know some people make their own. Whatever you care to share as I don’t have $4000 dollars.

Andrew

Andrew,

Sorry to hear of this company’s failings. As you know, I am not the least bit surprised.

I don’t think anyone that offers such a service would know how to clean records properly. Real cleaning is much more difficult than any of these folks think it is. If they knew how hard it is, they would know how expensive the service would have to be and how unlikely it would be that anyone would want to pay such a price to have a record cleaned and its sound improved.

We don’t offer such a service partly because we know exactly how much work is involved.

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