How to Clean Your Vinyl Records and WHY It Might Sound so Bad Before You Clean

0:00 I reckon the more videos like this on the web, the better

Right, I reckon the more videos like this on the web, the better. Especially because there's still a lot of people out there who love using vinyl. How do I clean my piece of vinyl? Right, so for copyright reasons, I don't want to play much of this track. Really, I don't need to, because as soon as I put the needle in the record, you should really be able to hear a crackly sound before the actual track starts. But anyway, it's Mr. DJ Sneak. So I'm going to lift the tonearm and I'm going to press play. Just move that back slightly because I want you to be able to hear the crackling sound before the actual track starts. The volume's up, lower it down. OK, you can hear that crackling sound. There you go.

I don't think I'm going to have any copyright issues with that. OK, so bring the needle back up, move it to the armrest, press it down. Play down.

1:10 There's lots of cleaning products on the web out there

Play down, sorry. Alright, so there's lots of cleaning products on the web out there. I'm sure there are and they cost a fortune. But this cleaning product, it's practically everywhere and it's free. It's called Water. I have got a relatively soft sort of cloth that I'll use for drying the washing. I mean, you know the pots and pans and that's it. Alright, it's been in and out of the wash, but it has recently been cleaned. So by all rights, it should be clean enough to use. So what I'm going to do now is I'm not even going to start the turntable. I'm going to turn it off to make sure that I don't accidentally start it up and move the motor in an awkward way. But then again, that's what these are meant to do anyway.

So what I'm going to do, I'm going to put this very, very damp cloth, not slightly damp, but very damp, not dripping, just very damp. And I'm going to move that the turntable now in, of course, circular motion. That's the way it goes and go up or down side to side. If it does, I would suggest you go and get your turntable seen by someone who could hopefully fix it for you. Alright, so I'm just going to do that again and let's have a listen. Alright, proofs in the pudding here. So you heard it sounded a bit dodgy. Let's hear. It now turn it on, start it up. I haven't touched the volume lift the tone arm, place that down onto the record and here we go.

2:50 It's always a good idea to clean your vinyl before playing

All right, still maybe a couple of sounds, but there was a definite difference in between that and what we heard earlier. So just imagine if you did that to the entire record, you would indeed hear a difference. Not only that, but what you've got to remember, especially with old school vinyl and also even if you've had a whole bunch of vinyl, let's say that was relatively clean when you stacked it away. It's been stacked for however many years you bring it back out, you could start to get residue build up on there. So it's always a good idea to clean your vinyl before playing. And also what you have to think of as well is even if you got a thousand microscopic bits of dust in that groove. The styli, the needle itself is in that groove and over time it's going to pick up those little bits.

And if you think about it, the analogy here, it's a little bit like a snowplow as the snow plough moves along. It's pushing the snow with it. Of course, there's no point having it behind. It's got to move in front and eventually that snowplow will maybe move the snow to one side, but whatever's in front of it, it's going to move. And that's sort of like how the needle on a record works as it moves around the groove. It will not just jump over bits of debris in the groove. It very, very may likely have that in front of it while it all sorry in front of it this side while it moves. So it's going to slowly have a build up of bits of dust, etcetera, which in turn means that very soon the audio sound that you're listening to will slowly start to get worse because you're having all that debris around the diamond tip.

Now, I hope that makes sense. All right. Hope this has been help practice and enjoy. Thank you.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.