On Friday, December 6, 2013 8:33:10 AM UTC-8, ScottW wrote:
On Thursday, December 5, 2013 6:19:21 PM UTC-8, Audio_Empire wrote:
Not my experience at all, Scott. I have thousands of LPs, and a number of years ago I bought a "Nitty-Gritty" record cleaning machine. I have found that any time my records get a bit grungy, a good clean with the Nitty-Gritty will have them sounding pristine again.
I have records over 30 years old that play very well. They've never seen anything less than an AR TT and Shure M91 cart in my college days.
Every play is preceded by a simple dust removal with moistened brush.
My VPI record cleaner has helped (though I thinks it best value is cleaning a new album before ever
playing it) but it isn't a miracle worker and I've tried quite a number of cleaner solutions (disc doctor
seems to work as well as any for me). It isn't dirt that I can clean away that has turned me off to used
vinyl.
It's playing them on crappy gear, or a worn stylus, or excessive tracking force or misaligned cart or
grinding the dirt in with a stylus.
A large number of factors can cause excessive wear or damage.
Once the vinyl itself is damaged, no cleaner will repair it...and vinyl is actually quite soft.
No argument there.
My experience (or luck) is that the used vinyl market is mostly worn out abused junk. It's simply not
been worth the effort.
Well it does take care, that's for sure. I've been lucky. I examine used disks carefully before buying.
I look for signs of wear, and where I buy used vinyl, I ask the attendant to play a bit from several
places on both sides. I can generally tell the sound of surface wear from the sound of dirt. I will
purchase a dirty record, I will not purchase a worn or scratched one. I don't do that any more though.
I figure I've enough LPs. some of which are more than 60 years old.
Now it's very possible that classic music collectors might typically take more care, though my few
acquisitions in that category haven't born fruit either.
Well, that's all I buy is classical.
I'm not going to argue (much 
) with your experience with the goo cleaner but I do recall when it was
out. One evaluation I read indicated (and seemed to make sense) was that the liquid was too thick to
penetrate deep into the the groove or the modulation of the vinyl. It cleaned the surface and made it
look clean but didn't have much effect where the diamond hits the plastic..
That evaluation was incorrect. Obviously, the writer never actually tried it. Looking at the surface
of a goo-cleaned record under a microscope before and after showed that the records were clean
as a whistle. It was amazing, really. And like I said, they felt clean too when you ran a record brush
over them as they spun on the turntable, and those brush fibers went down into the grooves. Before
cleaning you felt a slight tug on the brush, afterwards, much less.
A major component of every liquid cleaner is a wetting agent to allow deep groove penetration.
Often I find that imperfections or marks/stains I can see don't have an audible impact. Old cheap
paper sleeves used to mark up my pop albums just inserting them, but it never caused any noise.
The dust they produce was another matter.
You're right there. That surface abrasion that paper liners caused was superficial and caused no
audible damage. But dust and bits of paper that got pushed into the grooves by the stylus look
like boulders under the microscope and those you could certainly hear.
ScottW