The Loricraft PRC6i record cleaning machine and the WallySkater v2.1 Pro

In my last Spin Doctor column, I gave an overview of my experiences cleaning records over the last 50-plus years and the advances in record cleaning technology over that time. My review of the HumminGuru NOVA ultrasonic record cleaner focused on that increasingly popular approach to record cleaning, using ultrasonic cavitation instead of scrubbing the record with a brush. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that half-century of playing around with audio gear, it’s that it can be a mistake to embrace a new technology just because of its newness, dismissing what came before as obsolete. The vinyl record itself is a good example of a technology discarded as obsolete, then embraced again by new (and old) generations. You can add vacuum-tube amplifiers, analog tape, and much else in our hobby to that list.

- BY MICHAEL TREI

The oldest of those two record-cleaning technologies is hardly obsolete. Most of the machines still cleaning today use the brush-and-vacuum approach. But I’m starting to see a split in the market, the top end dominated by ultrasonic cleaners. Vacuum machines are mostly, though not exclusively, considerably lower in price, usually below $1000. Ultra- sonic cleaning is clearly the flavor du jour, but something has been bugging me about ultrasonic cleaning from the start.

Cavitation cleaning has an amazing ability to scrub out deeply embedded groove contamination—ultrasonics are usually better at this than scrubbers—it’s the differences in how these two types of machines dry the cleaned record that leave me scratching my head a bit.

With a cavitation cleaner, contaminants get knocked off the record by the cavitation microbursts, then dispersed in the water surrounding the record. When the clean- ing cycle is complete, you either remove the record and allow it to air dry or leave it to the machine to drain the water before the record is dried with fans blowing air over the record surface.