Greg Smith Reviews....

The old saying states that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I can't vouch for that one, but when it comes to my music collection, the alternative cliche that cleanliness is next to impossible is far more appropriate. My CDs go with me everywhere, from the dust haven that is my room to the trunk of my car. And most of the vinyl I encounter is rather old and dirty. It doesn't matter how good the rest of your music reproduction system is if your original source media skips or mistracks because of accumulated grime. I've tried some cleaning equipment before. There are a number of widely available cleaning systems for both types of media from companies like Discwasher or Allsop, usually in the $10-$20 range. While these products are effective for easy jobs, they just don't have the muscle for dealing with the really hard work. For example, there are lots of bargains available in used media (everything except Garth Brooks albums), but the typical examples I get need a good scrubbing before I would want to expose my expensive gear to them.

Now, the high-end market has lots of products to address that need. Frankly, I think it's a little silly to spend hundreds of dollars on one of the record or CD cleaning machines available for such purposes. Not only do I not have room to put such a beast, they seem like overly complicated solutions. Besides, I'd rather spend the money buying more music instead. I will admit that if you're cleaning lots of records, they can be justified on a time savings basis. Recently I discovered The Disc Doctor, a pseudonym for chemist H. Duane Goldman. The good doctor sells cleaning kits that only cost a little more than the bargain ones, while claiming to perform even better than the expensive machines. More than just items for sale, the Disc Doctor's products advance a philosophy about keeping your precious source material spotless without needing to spend lots of money, utilizing cost-effective products from other manufacturers as needed. Since that's right up my alley, I got some samples of both the CD and LP cleaner and began my training as a Disc Intern in the doctor's cleaning hospital.

Brushing up on old material

There are two basic types of crud that assault your source material. When you think about cleaning, you're probably thinking about getting rid of dirt, fingerprints, grease, and other such high-grade nasties. While this is certainly important, it's not something you run into every day. Hopefully, you treat your discs well enough that they don't get nasty junk smeared on them. Even the most impeccable treatment won't save you from dust and other such airborne particles. Even an immaculate LP needs only to be put in its liner to pick up some small particles, and CD jewel boxes are certainly not the most sanitary of environments. Although both types of media will play just fine even with small amounts of dust, it's important to get rid of as much dust as possible for two reasons. First, removing the particles when they are small keeps them from building up into more difficult to cleanse collectives. Also important is that your playback equipment is being damaged to some small extent over time by this treatment. Dust that cakes on the CD laser lens will ruin tracking ability, and tracing through the dirt is no way to keep your record stylus in top shape.

The usual way to get rid of small amounts of surface dust on LPs to use a record brush. For some reason, I had never thought of using one on CDs as well before the Disc Doctor recommended it to me, but they are effective for that media as well. The record brush I've had for years has been the classic Discwasher model. This unit is certainly showing its age at this point, and I can't recommend it compared with the modern brushes. There are three manufacturers of commonly available recording cleaning brushes aimed at the more demanding buyer. Audioquest, Hunt, and Decca all make carbon-fiber brushes that range in price from $15 to $25. I picked up samples of the Decca and Audioquest units. Here's what Duane Goldman has to say about these units:

Well, he certainly doesn't mince words, does he? After trying the two I had, I have to say I prefer the Audioquest brush myself. It seems more effective at getting rid of little bits of dust than the Decca unit (probably because it is killing off static as I go). The Disc Doctor philosophy says that real cleaning shouldn't be done with the same brush that you wipe simple dust off with, so the actual deep cleaning properties of the brushes in question is irrelevant (this is the claimed performance advantage of the more expensive Decca and Hunt units). Since at $15 the Audioquest is the cheapest brush, it seems the one to get. I have noticed that it's a bit hard to track down; even though there are innumerable Audioquest dealers for their cables, very few seem to carry the brush as well. I ended up ordering mine from another company using the doctor moniker, Jerry Raskin's Needle Doctor, which happens to be the only place I found who carries all three brushes. If you know you need one in advance, the Disc Doctor will sell you one with the rest of the cleaning supplies for $13.50, which is a good deal.

Normally you use a record brush by rotating the playing surface underneath it, with the brush perpendicular to the groove. This accumulates the dust at the edge of the brush; to remove it, turn the brush a bit and move it off the edge of the surface (all the while continuing to rotate). This same technique works with CDs as well. Normally, we're told that CD cleaning should only be done by strokes from the inside to outside of the disc. This is because scratches that travel in that direction are easier for the player to correct than ones that travel in a more horizontal path along the circular groove. If you use a record brush that way, stroking from inside to out, you'll scratch your CDs all up. Use the brush just like you would on an LP; the fibers are small enough to dig into the plastic surface a bit without scratching it. I found the AQ brush effective at cleaning dust from my CD tray as well.

One thing to watch out for is that you don't apply pressure to the brush. The weight of the brush itself is sufficient and accurate for getting dust off. Pressing down will damage the attachment of the fibers to the brush, leaving bristles behind. When they wear off, they are extremely difficult to remove. Just use your hands to guide the brush along the correct path, don't think you're getting a better clean by forcing it downward. As you use your brush more, you'll find it accumulates its own dust and dirt that need to get cleaned off it. The Decca brush includes a little plastic piece shaped so that, when you use the brush on it, it traps the dust and helps clean it off better. I found myself using that accessory on my Audioquest brush to clean it off. The Disc Doctor says that his cleaning fluid is effective at "regenerating" used brushes; soak 1/4 to 3/8" of the tips overnight in the fluid, then rinse with distilled water. A de-stat gun, used periodically on the brush, is also claimed to be effective at controlling dust accumulation. I found the only real problem with the AQ brush to be the fact that it loses fibers too often for my taste. One way you might try and control that is to occasionally vacuum the bristles to suck up the loose ones.

The Disc Doctor's Miracle CD Cleaner

Cleans approximately 125-250 CDs with 4oz of fluid, $20 delivered (discount available if ordered with the record cleaner)

Let's look at the CD cleaning process first, as it's a bit easier than the LP one but has some similar elements. The package includes a bottle of cleaning fluid and some sample cotton pads used for the cleaning and drying. You only get enough pads for cleaning 10 discs in the package; you'll have to get some more yourself. The pads are "Crystal Beauty Pads", 100% cotton from Absorbent Cotton Company. They shouldn't be too hard to track down at a drug store. Any cotton pad should be fine for this; the thing to watch for is that they are made with pure cotton, and bear the little cotton emblem. Anything that isn't pure and has synthetic material mixed in can scratch the CD surface. The included pads are round, which work better for drying than the square cotton pads do. Not shipping the full complement to you lets the company keep its shipping and packaging charges down.

The other thing you'll need is some distilled water (if you've got a good water filter on your tap, that should be good enough instead). The total price of the whole works, even after getting some more pads and some water, works out to about 10 cents per cleaned disc, which is certainly a bargain. Some of the other disc cleaning products on the market look less expensive initially, but when you factor in the fluid refilling cost and other consumable parts (like cleaning pads) the cost per disc may be higher. By using cheap cotton pads and only charging you for concentrated cleaning fluid, you end up with a very good deal from the Disc Doctor.

Before you attempt to use the cleaner, you should do a once- over with a record brush just to remove big particles and minimize the amount of scratching from the dirt dragging across the surface. If you've really got big particles to remove, a quick distilled water rinse first can remove them without damaging anything. The instructions state to first put 5-10 drops of the fluid on one of the cotton pads, then apply to the entire CD surface. CD lasers play through the bottom of the CD to read the data pits located toward the top. Accordingly, it's dirt on the non-label side of the disc that causes playback problems. It's best to use the normal inside to outside radial motion even when using the benign cotton pads, just to minimize the chance of damage; if you've got real cotton, it really shouldn't make a difference what direction you wipe in, but I'm paranoid. Regular cotton balls are also an acceptable application method for the cleaner--I found the balls to provide a more even application of the cleaning fluid, and greatly preferred them for this step. It will be tough to dispense exactly 5 drops of the cleaner with the bottles supplied; usually I found that I got a bit more out than I wanted. If you're that concerned you can always use something more precise to dispense it from.

After the cleaner has been used all over, you'll need to rise with distilled water. Without rising, the fluid dries to a hazy covering that doesn't appear to do any damage to playback, although any optical distortion like that is always a hazard. There was no trace of this haze after rinsing. I found a regular spray bottle to be the best way to evenly apply distilled water without soaking the disc and wasting fluid (even though distilled water is cheap, using too much means you'll run out quicker and need to get more). Keeping a finger in the middle hole and spraying minimizes the amount of liquid that gets onto to label side. Shake the big drops off, then use one of the cotton pads to dry everything (again, a radial motion is probably your best bet). The cotton balls aren't nearly as effective for the drying step, so the pads are all I used for this part. You can get most of the water up just by holding the pad on the surface and letting it absorb (this process is referred to as wicking). If you just wipe without letting the water soak in, one pad isn't quite enough to get everything totally dry. The instructions are explicit about not reusing pads for cleaning or drying, because of the chance for cross-contamination between discs (once you get dirt on a pad, you don't want to use it again).

Cotton balls for cleaner application and the supplied pads for drying ended up being my favorite combination. One persistent problem you'll run into with this system is that the cotton leaves behind small cotton fibers. The ones that shed during the cleaning stage get rinsed away, but usually there are some left after drying. A quick brush of the carbon-fiber record brush easily picked all these up.

After some practice, the whole cleaning cycle ended up taking me about 3 minutes to do (including the walks between the room where my CDs are the sink used for rinsing). The final results were as good as any CD cleaner I've ever used, and the surface especially polished and shiny when finished. The fluid seemed effective at cutting through the typical grime my collection accumulates, and surface damage from the cleaning procedure was minimal. You can't expect to clean your CDs without hurting them at all, because the simple act of moving the dirt around is bound to scratch at least a little bit no matter how careful you are. This is even more reason to keep the dirt off your collection in the first place. I went through my collection of damaged discs just to see if any of them would be revived by the cleaning process, without any resurrections. You can't expect that just cleaning will fix every problem you may have, but it's the only effective way to keep that damage from happening in the first place. At about $40 for the fluid, a record brush, and associated accessories, the Disc Doctor's Miracle CD Cleaner system is a pittance compared with what your music collection costs. It's a practical solution to CD cleaning that is designed with the most important directive for doctors in mind: "first, do no harm".

The Disc Doctor's Miracle Record Cleaner

Cleaning LPs is a bit more of an adventure than those new- fangled CDs provide. The error correction facilities in CD players means that dirty CDs go directly from sounding fine to skipping. Dirty vinyl shows degraded performance as soon as the first dirt starts appearing. This is why LP cleaning is something just about everybody does, while CD cleaning is a far more rare trait. As someone who is new to "real" LP playback, my experience with vinyl cleaning has been limited to brushing with the old Discwasher unit, which is obviously a tool of insufficient power to really do a good job (it's just as likely to grind the dirt deep into the groove as it is to remove it). The Disc Doctor's system is far more effective, although it does take a bit more time and effort to use properly.

The instructions for cleaning are available on the company's home page if you want to hear their spin on things. I ended up with a slightly modified procedure from what they recommended. The basic parts of the system are the cleaning fluid itself and two special cleaning brushes to apply it with. These brushes are designed to hug the groove more tightly than normal record brushes--with the fluid applied, you can get enough suction that you can pick the record up with one of them. One brush is used for cleaning, the second for rinsing. You'll also need some distilled water, a rack to put the records for drying, and something to cover the work area in. Normally the company recommends getting a spare record mat or two to provide a suitable work area to put the vinyl on. Combine this with a lazy Susan to spin the album around for easier access, and the cleaning is pretty easy. What I ended up doing is getting an old turntable that was beyond repair, but with an intact record mat and a platter I could spin by hand. This gives you an exactly sized and easy to work with space.

You start by putting the cleaner on one of the special brushes, which we'll refer to as the cleaner brush. There are guidelines for how much you need, but after doing a few you'll get the feel for it without needing to worry about measuring things. Go around the entire surface of the record once to spread the fluid around. Next, there is a scrubbing step, where you make about six passes over the record, dealing with 1/3 of the surface area at a time. After that, I went around the outside again to pick up as much of the cleaner as possible with that brush, then pressed my finger down on the brush to clean the foam and cleaner off. Another pass around the outside pulls up a bit more of the cleaner, and you're done with the cleaning brush for this side. Grab the rinsing brush and clean it off well, soaking it with distilled water. I found a spray bottle helpful for holding the water, as it let me hit the brush with a good amount of pressure to hose away the remnants of the last round of cleaning. Make a pass around the outside to distribute the rinse water, then go through the same scrubbing motions with it to get all the cleaner out of the grooves. Another spin around the surface pulls up some of the rinse water; squeegee it out with a finger or the other brush handle, rinse lightly with water, then squeegee again so it can absorb more water. Go around the entire record getting as much water as possible up with the brush. For final drying, you can use a cotton towel; I chose the really cheap way out, and used toilet paper (it needs to be the cheap unscented type). I'm not proud, and it's certainly economical. Pat the surface lightly. You can wipe a bit if you want, but do so carefully or the paper can shred.

That's the basic procedure I ended up with. Clean the work surface and brushes a bit, flip the album over and do the other side, and you're ready to put it in the drying rack for about 30 minutes of air drying before it's ready to go. If you do a bunch of them at once (I found around 6 at a time was about right), it ends up being around 10-15 minutes per album to go through the whole cleaning ritual the way I was doing it. I'm sure you could optimize it to go quicker if you really wanted to hurry it; it is possible to use a record cleaning machine for the steps involving fluid removal if you have one, which would really make it go quicker. The only minor problem I ran into was the occasional moment when I wasn't sure which brush was the cleaner and which was the rinser; a quick sniff of the brushes will let you distinguish the chemical smell of the cleaning brush.

After they are dry, you'll still need to pick up little bits of accumulated dust and lint with a regular carbon-fiber record brush, like the Audioquest unit they recommend. I'm told that it takes 2-3 plays of the record after cleaning before the record is in optimum shape for playback. I was very happy with the improvement during the first playback after cleaning. The sound came out of a quieter background, and just sounded more alive overall. As a bonus, I no longer needed to stop constantly to clean the stylus. Here's the reasoning behind the improvements in subsequent playback, again quoting H. Duane Goldman:

The Disc Doctor says that a single cleaning with their system is sufficient forever; keep the dust off with a carbon-fiber record brush afterward, and you'll never need to clean it again. If that's true, this is certainly a more economical method than any other in the long run. The whole system is designed to be inexpensive for long-term use. The cleaning brushes come with a replaceable surface on them, and a single replacement is included free with the initial purchase. The fluid is inexpensive, and if your records are only mildly dirty, it can be diluted with distilled water for an even better value.

Sure, it's a bit of work, but the Miracle Record Cleaner is well worth it for the benefits you receive--better sounding records, with a minimum of upkeep for future playback. I'll leave it to the reviewers who have more expensive equipment to evaluate how this system compares with more traditional record cleaning gear, but I can certainly say it's far better than the really cheap methods I had been using. At around $50 for everything you need to get started, and low overhead costs for additional records, it's a tough deal to beat. You could even shave off a few dollars in spots; for example, I saved $5 by getting a set of "cosmetically imperfect" cleaning brushes, and there is nothing wrong with them--the defect is barely noticeable. And if you have something other than standard LPs, there are a variety of brushes available in different sizes; even specialized cleaning material for Edison Diamond Discs, should your collection really go back. If you're not cleaning your records well now, you should, and you'll be hard pressed to find a better way to do so economically than the Disc Doctor's Miracle Record Cleaner.

The Disc Doctor's Miracle Cleaner for Records and Compact Discs

Brushing up on old material

The Disc Doctor's Miracle CD Cleaner

Cleans approximately 125-250 CDs with 4oz of fluid, $20 delivered (discount available if ordered with the record cleaner)

The Disc Doctor's Miracle Record Cleaner

For more information, visit The Disc Doctor himself, e-mail lanyap@inlink.com, or call (314) 205-1388.

Doctor himself, e-mail lanyap@inlink.com, or call (314) 205-1388.