In order to achieve best possible sound, your record collection needs only the best care – and Chisto has you covered with premium-quality vinyl cleaner products.
Why do I need a vinyl cleaner for my LP collection? Do my records really require specialized cleaning items?
To a lot of audiophiles the need to clean their vinyl archive regularly comes as a surprise, but it’s pretty obvious – unlike CDs, LPs made from PVC are quite delicate and sensitive, therefore, outside factors can drastically change the way they sound. Simply put, if your LPs are dirty, they will sound far worse than when their clean: this has to do with dust and dirt accumulating in the depths (the microgrooves) of the record and thus causing problems during play, when the needle of your turntable collides with the surface of the vinyl disc.
Now, do you require a special vinyl cleaner for taking care of your LPs? Yes, absolutely! Again, vinyl records are sensitive, so using household cleaning items that are designed for a completely different purpose may not only be ineffective, but also very harmful for the condition of your LP. This is precisely the reason we at Chisto set out to create a vinyl cleaner of our own in the first place – we wanted an all-in-one vinyl record cleaner that would rid you of a headache of having to look for one of these items all over the Web.
Sure, typical household cleaning items may harm my LPs, but what about these DIY recipes for record vinyl cleaner I see a lot on the Internet?
Well, whether you want to trust these recipes and their authors or not is entirely up to you, but based on our experience (since, as fellow audiophiles, we had to deal with the same problems) following DIY recipes is generally not recommended. They certainly are cheaper, but there is very little guarantee that this hypothetical record vinyl cleaner will be effective and completely safe for. In this case, we believe it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Alright, so let’s say I want to buy a vinyl record cleaner. What features should I be on the lookout for?
A really good vinyl record cleaner that will serve you for a long time needs to have several features, some of which might be obvious, while others might sound new to your ears. Firstly, safety: if a record vinyl cleaner has any chance of causing harm to your record, it is not worth using. Secondly, you need to keep in mind the chemical compound of your vinyl cleaner of choice: it needs to be able to completely dissolve after your vinyl record cleaning procedures and not leave any residue on the surface, because it will attract even more dust and cause a lot of headache in the long run. Last but not least in terms of vinyl record cleaning itself, your solution of choice needs to be able to go deep and clear out the microgrooves of your record, since most of foreign substances are typically accumulated there.
However, there is more to choosing a vinyl cleaner than that. Of course, it needs to be equally effective with records of any age (and even material – yes, shellacs count). Older records can be notoriously fragile, while newer LPs tend to covered in a special substance called MRA that is used during pressing: MRA makes the sound seem “muffled”, and while it does eventually come off (which is why some audio aficionados believe that LPs need to “break in”), an effective cleaner should be able to take care of it immediately. Another thing some people don’t realize is that the aforementioned microgrooves tend to make a perfect habitat for various kinds of microorganisms. Couple that with good living conditions (since LP collections should be stationed in a stable, controlled environment) and viola – you have yourself a potentially hazardous situation for your health (and the health of your family members is at risk too). Solution? Perhaps your vinyl cleaner of choice needs to also feature antibacterial treatment.
And here we are at the final frontier of vinyl record cleaning – static elimination. Static is every audiophile’s mortal enemy. It is the one thing constantly standing in the way of our desired audio heaven, as it tampers with signal transmission and ultimately distorts the signal itself, causing worse audio quality. Static is the hardest foe to battle, as the ideal vinyl cleaner will need to have a special set of chemicals so that it can eliminate static before it can impact the audio quality.
So is there a product that has all of these features for my vinyl record cleaning procedures?
Certainly! We at Chisto have been looking for such a product for a while, and upon concluding that no vinyl cleaner on the market matches our standards and demands, we have set out to create our own solution for all LP-related problems. Since some of the features we wanted to include needed knowledge and experience beyond our audiophillic expertise, we have turned to professional chemists for help. They assisted us in assembling the chemical compound that is used in all of Chisto’s items. After months of rigorous testing and quality control (and with help of fellow audiophiles from around the globe), we are ready to present our product line of special Audio Cosmetics – Chisto’s Easy Groove. The chemical formula that we’ve assembled is perfectly capable of dealing with all of the issues we’ve discussed earlier in the article, and we continue to improve it as new discoveries in the chemical industry come along (for example, we’ve significantly reduced the time needed for our cleaner to dissipate static).
By picking Chisto, you’re picking quality control, which is something sorely lacking in the audiophile market these days. Easy Groove is effective yet gentle, so you can be sure that your records will sound every bit as good as they’ll look!