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Audio Desk Systeme's Vinyl cleaner:

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AUDIO DESK SYSTEME - Ultrasonic Vinyl Cleaner

I've been waiting to get my hands on one of these for awhile, and finally received my very own unit from The Cable Company today. Compared to my VPI HW 17, this little bugger's like a Smart Car to the VPI's Lincoln Navigator. But does it do the trick?

I had to wait to find out - it needs just over a gallon of distilled water, and I didn't have any on hand. I was fairly busy during the morning, so it wasn't until noon'ish that I was able to drive to the store and pick up the required H2O. Once home, I emptied the little cleaning fluid bottle that comes with the machine into the reservoir along with the water, and that was pretty much all I needed to do.

So then I picked out a record from the collection, and old Pablo of Ella Fitzgerald and Andre Previn: Nice Work If You Can Get It, which I had previously cleaned (some time ago) on my VPI (and which had been cleaned by the record shop I purchased it from using a Nitty Gritty). I placed it on the ProJect Debut III USB with a Sound-Smith Carmen cartridge (quite nice, actually), which feeds my iMac's USB port and records via the USB Codec to my favorite digitizing software: Pure Vinyl, from Channel-D. I proceeded to record the title track (track 2, side 1) to the computer, for later comparison.

NEXT: As a matter of pure OCD, I decided to run it through the Audio Desk Systeme Ultrasonic Vinyl Cleaner twice. Whatever it was that the machine did, I wanted it to do it really well, and I use the same amount of OCD record cleaning acumen with the VPI (I also use a vibrating toothbrush while using the VPI, but that's a story and a technique for another time).

NOTE: This machine takes a dog's age to clean a record, but at least you can walk away from it while it does it's thing automatically. There's no process for you to stick your fingers into, so you might as well go make yourself useful and do something like put away the stuff in the dishwasher.

I then placed the record on the turntable and went through the very same recording routine as I did the first time. Using the USB Codec, there's actually no parameter I can change to edit the sound of the recording.

I then rendered the tracks from within Pure Vinyl's editor, and popped them in my iTunes.

Wow.

Seriously, wow.

The first track sounded ok, mind you - but the "clean" track not only sounded clearer, it sounded louder. Better dynamic contrast, more harmonic information, and this isn't at all subtle! Whatever this machine dragged out of the grooves and into the waste water (and off the record!), it had to have been substantial. The difference was like taking cotton balls out of your ears and hearing spectral information that you would have sworn wasn't on the original.

Aside from A/B'ing a dirty record to a clean one (who can't appreciate the difference there?), I haven't heard as much of a change in presentation like this due to a cleaning machine. Here we took what was ostensibly a clean record, cleaned it again via the new machine, and what we got was a whole new sounding record. Phenomenal!

My next experiment is to take a completely new Eric Bibb 45rpm LP from Opus 3, and do the before and after comparo. We'll see how this all washes out ... literally.

Stay tuned ...

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