Re: Record cleaning machines

[Graham Newton <gn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Esther Gillie forwarded:
Georgia Music Hall of Fame
Laura Botts originally wrote...

> Now we are looking into record cleaning machines as well.

And I said...
The only cleaning system that approaches what the Monks machine is
capable of, is the manual system supplied by the Disc Doctor, which
unfortunately is too labor intensive for anything other than casual use.

Before Duane Goldman (the Disc Doctor) gets his shirt in a knot over my
comments (he and I have had many conversations about this and other related
things in the past) I'll expand a little on the Disc Doctor's cleaning system.

The brushes he supplies are excellent and the specialized chemistry, likewise,
is properly designed and works superbly well.

It is, however, a manual system requiring a significant amount of labor per
disc cleaned.  If you have a source of free "grunt labor" (yourself as a
collector or students maybe?) to apply to the process, this is by far the
cheapest way to get almost surgically clean records.  If the applied labor
costs hard money, then you will recoup the initial expense rapidly with the
Monks machine as well as speeding up the through-put substantially.

Where the record collection is a large one (a lot more than a few hundreds),
this labor requirement may preclude using a manual system.  The Disc Doctor's
chemistry can certainly be very effectively used with the Keith Monks Cleaning
Machine, and nothing should be read into my previous message to imply that it
couldn't be used... in fact, I recommend it, and have recommended it for some
time, along with a few other things which I have used very successfully as
accessory items to the Monks machine. The Monks "Archivist" machine is the
first dual-chemistry machine for the purpose, and is ideally suited to this
process.

Specifically, I believe that one very significant advantage of the Monks
machine is the minimizing of the "wet" cycle of the cleaning process, and this
should be clearly obvious to anyone involved with archival storage and
restoration of phonograph records.

Again, if you want more information, please email me off-list or call me at 
(416) 444-3444


... Graham Newton

-- 
Audio Restoration by Graham Newton, http://www.audio-restoration.com
World class professional services applied to phonograph and tape
recordings for consumers and re-releases, featuring CEDAR processes.