Our Step by Step Guide to Professional Record Cleaning
Years ago (2010?) we wrote:
We have not experimented with Ultrasonic cleaning, although we have heard good things about it from our audiophile friends and customers. It is simply not practical at this time to clean records the way we do — three steps of Walker fluids — and then add the additional steps required to bathe them in ultrasonic fluid and dry them. Our near-full-time record cleaning person can hardly keep up with the demands we make on her these days, what with shootouts going on five days a week. Making the cleaning process more time consuming is just not in the cards for the time being.
UPDATE 2016
We have now tried ultrasonic cleaning and are unable to see — read: hear — any benefit relative to the cleaning regimen that we have evolved over the last fifteen years of so.
Our take is simply this: No doubt it is better than nothing. It may be better than the VPI 16.5, or it might be better in conjunction with the 16.5. We leave it for others to determine how well any of these other approaches work.
We believe that the system we use does a dramatically better job than any other we have tested. It may not be cheap, but it really works, and it is worth every penny and every hour of what it costs in time and money.