Records. We love them because — in addition to filling our lives with magnificent music — they’re great fun to look at, and nice to hold. They’re “real” in a way that digital files, temporarily delivered to an app on your phone, are definitely not.
But this tactile, real-world appeal comes at a cost. Because records are actual, three-dimensional things that co-exist in time and space with dust, grime, and gunk, they can get dirty. And because their primary function is to reproduce sound by having their surface scraped by a delicate stylus, dirtiness is not just a cosmetic problem. When your needle scrapes through a groove filled with dust, dirt, or oils from your skin, it reproduces the sound of that filth; it bounces off the dirt, and slogs through the oil, missing the music. The sound of the dirtiness is dullness, clicks, pops, and even skips, if the problem is bad enough. Bottom line: dirty records sound bad. And that’s why we need to clean them.
But what’s the best way to clean your old records? I would say that the answer to that question entirely depends on how dirty they are to begin with, and why you’re cleaning them.
You want perfection? It’ll Cost You
The internet is filled with nerdy people like me who obsess over the “best” record cleaning technologies. As one might expect, the best systems are usually quite expensive — many hundreds of dollars for wet-vacuum cleaners, up to many thousands for custom-designed ultrasonic devices. I can tell you, having heard these devices in action, that they are absolutely 100% for real. If you want your old records to sound as good (or better) than they did when they were new, you can’t go wrong with an ultrasonic cleaning device.
But if you’re reading this article, you’re not really looking for the best way to make your meticulously cared-for vinyl sound absolutely perfect. You’re looking for the most cost- and time-efficient way to make the records that have been shoved into a corner of your garage sound good enough to grade accurately and sell. And for that, I recommend the following process:
My (much cheaper) recommendations
If your record looks “like new,” chances are the worst problem you’ve got is a bit of surface dust. To remove it, place the disc on a lint-free fabric surface (a clean old T-shirt works just fine), or on your turntable, and wipe each side a few times with a lint-free, dry cloth (preferably microfiber) in the direction of the grooves. Then give it a spin. If you hear pops and crackles, chances are the record has some deep deposits of invisible filth that you’ll need to remove. Read on for the best way to do that.
If your record looks anywhere from slightly dusty and smudgy to “yuck, that’s disgusting,” I recommend a simple, relatively low-cost device that I’ve been using for years: the Spin-Clean record washing system.
You can read more about the $75-150 Spin-Clean system here, but the bottom line is that it really does an excellent job cleaning old vinyl and shellac records, using a bath-and-brush wet-clean process. It’s a little time-consuming — there are no motors to do the work for you, so you’ll have to allocate about two to three minutes of time for each record, spinning it by hand through the device’s cleaning brushes and drying with lint-free cloth afterwards. But the Spin-Clean works, delivering a level of gunk and dust removal that’s — oh, I’d say 80-90% as good as a wet-vacuum or ultrasonic device, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Here’s a brief video I put together showing what a huge difference Spin-Clean made on a really dirty 45 RPM record I found at a thrift store. (And by the way: I don’t make any money from Spin-Clean for my endorsement; I just believe in the product!)
Let me worry about cleaning your records!
Of course, if you’re selling a record collection containing hundreds of discs, the cleaning process can get pretty tedious pretty quickly. Even using the Spin-Clean system, you’d probably end up spending about 18-20 hours washing and drying 300 to 400 discs. This is, of course, yet another reason why you might be better served offloading that hassle to an independent buyer. I’ll buy your records *and* your dirt, no questions asked!