Vinyl Cleaning - The Dirty Truth Letter from Mat Weisfeld, VPI Industries

Someone asked about this article and finally found the issue in a box of audio magazines. From Sounds Like... magazine, Issue #8, 1990.

Who would have thought 25 years later LPs are making a comeback, the number of RCFs on the market has more than doubled and high quality inner sleeves in abundance. Just goes to show how lousy we are predicting the future.

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Astonishing when you stop and think about it, then think back to when vinyl was all there was and we had next to nothing in RCFs, RCMs, quality inner sleeves and all that.
Who knew.
 
David-

You win! You have all the record cleaning machines together in one room. You are able to create a stand alone and various combination cleaning of each of your records. I know this is an invaluable experience because you can test, experiment and make your determinations of what is prefered and not prefered. No moral decisions here, just trade offs.

What you could help us all with is document your standards for clean and dirty. It does not have to be complicated, like "I removed .03 grams of particulate matter from Record X.." - though I am sure some of our astute hobbyists that read this may want to see some true objectivity. (And if you can help David and us on this, please come forward)

For your standard of clean, please take a moment in your own words, document with logical examples of what a clean record is to you. This way the reader has an understanding of what a standard of clean is.

Please do the same for the standard of dirty. It can be that record store find, that Discogs Disc that arrived from Greece, or the effect of pet dander, dust and oily human hands. Something to that effect that makes the record unsatisfactory to play on your turntable.

What is interesting is this cleaning machine, which includes both "Sonic" and "Vacuum" technologies. 1 What do they know that VPI, KLAudio, and Autodesk doesn't? 2 What have they learned? 3 Is this your next machine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dd9k5x2jaU

here is a Youtube search.. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clear+audio+matrix

Beyond this, 4 what other resource could you use to determine that one record machine is better than the other? 5Who could possible tell you what is what when you have all the RCMs right there in front of you?

First my answers to questions 4 & 5:

4: Myles B. Astor or Michael Fremer are verbose in all thing Vinyl. They are professional reviewers that stand as critics that many trust their judgment. (and I forgot someone, please add them because I don't know everyone or everything.)

5: More people who are either invited your house ;) or has the an agreeably high performing audio system to confirm what you are telling us. I am sure the people in Q4 have seen all this in one shape or another, but have not done the extensive test that you have- for one reason or another.

I conclude that you are doing great things for the art of music, vinyl and music enjoyment. You are not a magazine or a website with financial motives. Your quest is the truth. It may not be the absolute truth, but you have climbed the mountain, looked around and you can see things that many cannot. This reason to be, makes you THE expert, unless someone should challenge your findings. (Then life will get a whole lot more exciting for us in the audience). Keep up your "Audio Philanthropy" and be that maven for all of us to learn from.
 
MusicDirector said:
Good question. If it's holding up well after all that assault, it's safe to say that it is a very well built machine, (little doubt it isn't). With that amount of records there is no doubt about the need for it. It scares me to think about doing that many on my VPI, not that it may not hold up, but I wouldn't and I don't mind taking time to clean records at all. Makes me thankful that I only have a handful of records compared to almost everyone here.
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My Audio Deske lasted about 6500 records before it bit the dust - motor burned out. I did many of the records with 5 beeps (maximum cleaning time) though they probably only need one beep (normal cleaning). That probably led to an earlier demise. Clearly for most users that wouldn't be an issue. Anyway they replaced it with a new machine for $1500, a little more than 1/3rd the retail price. My dealer, Tim Marutani, handled the transaction. I had considered getting a KLA to replace it, but at the price and my general satisfaction with the AD, I decided to stay with AD. I'm around 1000 records into the new machine with no problems. I am only about 750 records away from finishing my ripping project, so that should be done in a few months! Hurrah!

PS. I had a total of 4 VPI machines over the 25+ years, cleaning my 15,000 records, most of them two different times. Three machines by necessity and one by upgrade.

Larry
 
Larry- Interesting comments and thank you for sharing. Also please feel free to create a thread about your Vinyl Ripping project- It's very interesting to me and I know others would like to learn from what you have learned. (I want to do this with a TASCAM DA-3000 and my current tube phono stage)

Regarding your postscript, have you had the chance to have all 4 VPI machines together, in one room, at the same time? (that just sounds naughty ;) ) It's unclear if you repurchased or had various combination of the four at two different times or ??? thanks.
 
astrotoy said:
My Audio Deske lasted about 6500 records before it bit the dust - motor burned out. I did many of the records with 5 beeps (maximum cleaning time) though they probably only need one beep (normal cleaning). That probably led to an earlier demise. Clearly for most users that wouldn't be an issue. Anyway they replaced it with a new machine for $1500, a little more than 1/3rd the retail price. My dealer, Tim Marutani, handled the transaction. I had considered getting a KLA to replace it, but at the price and my general satisfaction with the AD, I decided to stay with AD. I'm around 1000 records into the new machine with no problems. I am only about 750 records away from finishing my ripping project, so that should be done in a few months! Hurrah!

PS. I had a total of 4 VPI machines over the 25+ years, cleaning my 15,000 records, most of them two different times. Three machines by necessity and one by upgrade.

Larry
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Thanks Larry.
Wow, gave out after 6500 LPs huh? Although, considering the fact that you did max cleaning on all those records it might have gone to 7500 or more had you cleaned accordingly as you mentioned. Still, that's only about $1.63 per record and you can't put a price on the automation and value of time spent not to mention any wear and tear on your hands or something cleaning that many records by other means.
A replacement for $1500...how do they do that? If these machines were that to begin with sales would be through the roof. Although even at $4k, if I had a collection 1/4 the size of yours, I'd save up for however long it took and whatever to get one rather than try that stunt with my VPI. (Although I would not be putting really dirty records through without a first pass through the VPI or whatever machine already on hand). It would be worth every cent in my opinion. Sure, the VPI is a fraction of the cost, is a fine machine for it's purpose and most everything on it is easily replaced even by the end user, but my hands and the rest of my body and time are not replaceable.
Hmm, seeing that your already 1000 records in on the new one and not a hint of issues, perhaps some improvements were made inside someplace?

~Eric
 
Yes, Myles. Thank you! I am handy with Photoshop, so I am going to process the images and make my own pdf of this.
 
Thanks, Myles. I'm sure I read the article way back when. My 4 VPIs were consecutive. I started with the VPI 16, IIRC. then went to a 16.5, then a 17F, and then back to a 16.5. I gave the last 16.5, still in decent condition, to a friend, after I got the ADS. My dealer, Tim, negotiated the replacement ADS - rather than sending my old one back to Germany to be repaired. I don't know how the price was determined, but it seems that it probably is well below wholesale (negotiated to keep both he and me reasonably happy and getting me a replacement to not delay my ripping project.)

I'll do a thread on my ripping project at some point. I have talked about it in different threads and different sites, but nothing comprehensive.

Larry
 
David...Perhaps a few pics of grooves under a microscope could be in comparative effectiveness order?
 
Steve said:
David...Perhaps a few pics of grooves under a microscope could be in comparative effectiveness order?
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That's an interesting idea!

Do you have a recommended Microscope?
What should we be looking for other than a change in images?
 
o0OBillO0o said:
That's an interesting idea!

Do you have a recommended Microscope?
What should we be looking for other than a change in images?
Click to expand...

Maybe a Dino-lite will be good enough AM-7013MZT4 is 400x high resolution @ 5MB with polariser function should be good enough to show some level of granularity in the groove walls. Not sure if you could pick up groove damage at that resolution but you will see particulates easily enough.

I would use a scope with a polariser light that can be dialled in.

I haven't had much success using this model for SRA because it is short throw (long distance is better to track a stylus) so I will be buying the cheaper model recommended for that purpose.

If Myles is reading...do you recall what was the Dino-Lite model typically used for SRA measurement?
 
Golucid said:
Yes, Myles. Thank you! I am handy with Photoshop, so I am going to process the images and make my own pdf of this.
Click to expand...

Thanks I wanted to do that! :) Perhaps I can take pics with my camera this weekend and give you something better to work with.
 
Myles B. Astor said:
Thanks I wanted to do that! :) Perhaps I can take pics with my camera this weekend and give you something better to work with.
Click to expand...

PM me and I can email you my edits now in pdf. If they are good enough, can save you the hassle working on it again.
 
astrotoy said:
Thanks, Myles. I'm sure I read the article way back when. My 4 VPIs were consecutive. I started with the VPI 16, IIRC. then went to a 16.5, then a 17F, and then back to a 16.5. I gave the last 16.5, still in decent condition, to a friend, after I got the ADS. My dealer, Tim, negotiated the replacement ADS - rather than sending my old one back to Germany to be repaired. I don't know how the price was determined, but it seems that it probably is well below wholesale (negotiated to keep both he and me reasonably happy and getting me a replacement to not delay my ripping project.)

I'll do a thread on my ripping project at some point. I have talked about it in different threads and different sites, but nothing comprehensive.

Larry
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Good dealer you have there Larry.:congrats:
 
Myles, I upload the pdf here on AS. Folks, all that I did was take Myles images, remove colour content, straightened and did some text sharpening and packaged into a pdf. Voila.
 
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