by erichayes » Wed Nov 08, 2006 8:06 pm
Hi All,
Shannon, as soon as you open a bottle of anhydrous isopropyl, it probably absorbs 5% of water from the air. 91% is plenty good for kitchen chemistry like this. The reason I specify anhydrous is to better ensure getting alcohol without a bunch of skin conditioners and rash inhibitors found in rubbing alcohol. BTW, rubbing alcohol is verboten for cleaning tape heads (remember those?) for the same reason.
I'm not familiar with deja blue, but if it's running 27 ppm after adding the secret stuff, it passes my muster just fine.
The reason I have a Nitty Gritty is because I was commissioned by my high school reunion committee back in 1985 to compile an anthology of favorite songs of the '60s to play at our 20th reunion in 1987. I put out a plea for records from other classmates, as my collection of rock was pretty limited (I was a folkie). The condition of the albums I received ranged from not too bad, to unlistenable. You have to remember that the phonographs teenagers of the '60s had available to them generally consisted of a VM changer with a 5 volt output crystal cartridge tracking at 15 grams, directly driving the grid(s) of a 50C5(s) for a scorching 1½ watts. My homebrew hi-fi was better than most of my classmates' parents.
Anyway, the NG did an excellent job of making the really dirty records listenable, and a fair job of making the pretty good ones better, but I regarded them as lost causes from the getgo--anything was going to be better than what I was starting with. I also tried it cautiosly on a couple of my own albums that had very good surfaces, the reason for which was because I didn't like them very much. I could hear little to no difference on surface noise--if anything, it went up slightly after cleaning. That's when I decided to switch from NG's $25.00 a gallon solution to my home brew. The results were the same, and I never looked back. My conclusion is one of those obvious ones: If your records aren't making noise, don't clean them.
When RCA came out with the DynaFlex records in the late 60s and early 70s, they cut the weight of the disc by around 30% and used less virgin vinyl in the mix. Most other major labels (Columbia, WEA, Capitol, etc) followed suit, leaving only the classical divisions, foreign labels such as DGG and Decca, and a few indies willing to pay the extra bucks for full size virgin vinyl blanks. Virgin vinyl is easily scratched, but yields the lowest noise floor by far. I have never cleaned any of my virgin vinyl albums, some of which date back to the late 50s, and they sound as good today as they did new.
What you're describing is a classic case of the stearate being stripped from the groove: the surface looks pristine but sounds like it spent a day at the beach. Ball Corporation (the canning supplies cpmpany) came out with a record preservation system in the late 70s called "Sound Guard" whose primary ingredient was some kind of polymer spray applied to the record surface, then hand buffed after a fairly aggressive solvent was applied to intentionally remove the stearate. It actually worked quite well, but, of course, it went the way of the dodo when the cassette and CD took over as the media of choice.
I have a couple of stripped records that I'm going to experiment with. My thoughts for a stearate replacement are running the gamut from castille shampoo to TriFlow to silicone. I'm more concerned with the vehicle of the latter two than the "active ingredient". Winding up with a squishy black blob of plastic is not my goal.
Eric in the Jefferson State