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Re: [ARSCLIST] arsclist HELP with cleaners for vinyl records
My apologies if this is a re-post. I'm not receiving a copy of my sends &
another member didn't see the first attempt..
Duane Goldman
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Hi Gary,
With all due respect to you & other members of the list I'd like to offer
the following remarks.
The critical issues, aside from safety which is foremost, are the actual
cleaning process & materials employed. Simply stated, formulations based
upon water soluble alcohols & wetting agents are incapable of thorough
record cleaning. Addition of commercial or industrial cleaning agents
intended for other applications can improve the cleaning capacity but leave
residues which can be difficult to remove & are often highly suspect when
long term safety is considered. These conclusions are based upon both
empirical & experimental evaluations of the chemical characteristics of the
media, contaminants & cleaning formulations.
Although many archivist appear satisfied with what is perceived as safe
approaches to record cleaning, they are, in fact, expending resources
without thoroughly removing biological feed stocks from the disc surface
leaving the long term potential for biological attack and affording
inferior sound quality during transfers. This is hard to criticize on one
level & frustrating on another.
Recent independent electron microscopic evaluation of cleaned vinyl
pressings clearly illustrate the quality of our approach. During this year
we will evaluate alternate approaches to the cleaning of lacquers prior to
plating in an effort to further improve the quality of analog
reproduction. If successful, the result will afford a high quality analog
product & serve as a reference point for improving digital sound
reproduction in the long term. After more than 20 years of evaluation & a
decade of attempts to involve government & institutional bodies in our
efforts to provide a safe & thorough approach to the cleaning &
preservation recorded disc media, we can only hope that this year will be
more productive than those past.
This year's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) clearly demonstrated both the
ongoing interest in analog media & its superior sound quality. Simply
transferring to digital media is not yet the long term solution when sound
quality is of concern.
Regards,
Duane Goldman
At 11:45 PM 1/15/2003 -0600, you wrote:
I have a record cleaning machine for my vinyl collection, but I need to
get some more cleaner to use with it. When I bought the machine, it came
with one small bottle of cleaner. I also bought a bottle of concentrate
that I added to a gallon of distilled water. After sitting around for
years, that mixture got kinda funky so I threw it away. It's time to get
something new.
I shopped around for commercial cleaners, but all the ones I found are
priced out of this world.
I did some research on the subject online. I think this is the solution I
want to make:
75 ml distilled water<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
25 ml Isopropyl alcohol (make sure there are no additives, like Lanolin)
.5 ml wetting agent (Kodak Photo flow, Triton X-114 or X-100)
... but instead of Triton X-114 or X-100 which are suppose to be nasty
things that can cause health problems, I hope to use Triton(tm) XL-80N
surfactant from Dow Chemical which is suppose to be safe.
I went to Dow's web page and requested a sample a couple weeks ago. The
only thing I received from them was a specification in the form of a .pdf
document.
Any thoughts/comments on the subject? Does anyone know I can buy a small
quantity of Triton(tm) XL-80N surfactant.
thanks
Gary
------
h. duane goldman, ph.d. | P.O. Box 37066 St. Louis, MO 63141
lagniappe chem. ltd. | (314) 205 1388 voice/fax/modem
"for the sound you thought you bought" | http://discdoc.com