Don't dismiss the dirt – cleaning your records properly could revitalise your vinyl collection

Dirt. I have it on vinyl. I'm not talking about the classic Alice In Chains album, although I do have that record. No, I'm talking about literal filth in my grooves, some of which may well have accrued for 40 years.

Now obviously over the years I've 'cleaned' my records – meticulously (but admittedly only occasionally) wiping with cloths and sprays to get rid of dust, hairs and fingermarks from the surface of records. I've held them up to the light to check their cleanliness relative to before, then put them back on the turntable and assumed it was the best that could be done.

But, it's only now that I truly appreciate just how deep down and dirty records can get. Recently, I was given a Spincare 'Record Cleaning Machine' (around £60 on Amazon) as a birthday present.

This involves mixing cleaning fluid with filtered water in a kind of tiny bath with plastic rollers (adjustable for record size) at either end, and soft cleaning pads in the middle.

You immerse your record to just below the label, turn three times clockwise and three times anti-clockwise, wipe the water from them with a lint-free cleaning cloth and put them on a drying rack for 10 or 20 minutes.

These types of record cleaning devices have been around for years, of course, but it's the first time I'd tried one myself.

A restorative effect?

I expected this ritual to have more or less the same results as wiping records over with spray and a cloth, but cleaning the records this way not only removed a lot of the pop and crackle that dust and dirt invariably causes, it actually had a restorative effect.

I've written before on What Hi-Fi? about looking after your old records, and bemoaned my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind, bought from Jumbo records in Leeds the day it came out. Within a week, back in my student flat with its wonky floors, I'd scratched it. And for nearly 35 years I'd resigned myself to the fact that Smells Like Teen Spirit would never not jump in the middle.

But, since putting the 1991 classic through the Spincare, miracle upon miracle, it no longer jumps at all. It turns out that it was not actually damaged per se, but rather it was dirt/dust/smudges or whatnot making it jump.

My similar-vintage copy of The Breeders’ Last Splash, jumpy on the first track for as long as I can remember, has been similarly cured. And, after putting a huge swathe of my vinyl collection through the Spincare, I was finding yet more albums that benefitted substantially from a good bath-time.

The obvious point here is that not only can your eye not really see the state of what's in a record's grooves, but sticky fingers (not the Rolling Stones record, although that came up nice too), dust ingrained in the grooves, cat hairs, even fibres from paper record sleeves, can so easily affect your vinyl replay. And it clearly doesn't take years to gather there. Nevermind was just two weeks old when it somehow amassed enough grot in its grooves to have me think it must have been damaged by tonearm-jump.

I've since cleaned most of my records, some with genuinely noticeable results – and let's just say my wife really did not look after her part of our collection. I've had my work cut out with several Dylan records and 'classics' from Poison and the Quireboys. But you know what? They've all had a new lease of life.

Other methods are available

To test an alternative approach to vinyl cleaning, I also tried Secret Chord Analogue Record Restore (around £150). More than just cleaning the vinyl, the claim of this Australian product is that by brushing a special proprietary gloop onto each side of a record, leaving it to dry and set, and then peeling it off, any dirt and dust would be taken away with it, leaving your vinyl all shiny and new.

Does it work? To a point, although the process is somewhat fiddly, especially taking the layer of resin off, which is not as easy as it looks and comes off in little bits unless you really paint it on thick in the first place. Sadly, the first record to receive this was a recently acquired but frankly awful-condition copy of The The's Soul Mining – which Record Restore could not, with the best will in the world, restore.

Several dirty but essentially undamaged records have, however, come up nice after the Record Restore treatment, but really it's horses for courses. The main thing is, whichever method you choose, don't underestimate the effect of dirt, visible or otherwise, on your records.

I also now give my records a going-over with an anti-static brush. One or two of my albums, particularly picture discs, use nasty plastic covers that, while you can see through to the record itself, can cause static on the surface of your vinyl – which is another common cause of crackling and popping.

You don't need to spend a fortune on a record cleaning machine, either; although you can – on the likes of the Keith Monks Prodigy (around £1295), or Pro-Ject's VC-S3 Premium Vinyl Record Cleaning Machine (£399). But, as I found, the simple, budget Spincare did the job at a mere fraction of the money.

Whichever method you chose, I'd urge you to give your collection a properly good clean. You might just resurrect an old favourite or two to good-as-new.

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