LP cleaner

[Woochifer]

The Nitty Gritty's a LOT more than just a vacuum! As others have pointed out, the main reason for having a wet-vac for your LPs is to basically maintain your albums in pristine condition. Some vinyl addicts that I know choose to play back their LPs without a dust cover on the turntable because in their opinion, static builds up quicker with the dust cover present. For them, the wet-vac is an essential part of their basic maintenance regimen.

I'm not sure that you need a full blown wet-vac like a Nitty Gritty, but it definitely is effective if you're absolutely obsessive about maintaining your LPs in top condition. A wet-vac will not magically resurrect worn records or abused used LPs with embedded gunk, but they will at least keep them from getting worse.

Whether or not it's worth the price is entirely up to you. My cleaning regimen is pretty simple -- with new or used LPs that I'm playing back for the first time, I use a Discwasher D4 to do a simple first pass that gets rid of any oily surface contaminants. Thereafter, I use a carbon fiber brush before every playback. I only go beyond this with the rarest albums in my collection (i.e. half-speed masters and direct discs), where I'll take them to a local record store that has a cleaning machine and pay them to do some deep cleaning. In the past, I've used the LAST record preservatives (it really works at reducing surface noise) and their deep cleaning solution.