Spin Doctor

The first album I ever bought with my own money—cash earned mowing neighbors' lawns—was a British plum-label pressing of Led Zeppelin II. It was 1971. I rode my prized Raleigh Chopper bike from our home on the coast of Denmark down the road a couple of miles to the local record store in a small town called Hørsholm.

Fifty-four years ago, this kind of unsupervised activity was considered pretty normal for a 9-year-old kid in Denmark, even with no cellphones or other tethers that allowed your parents to keep tabs on you. It was also a time when smaller record stores would let you listen to records over headphones before buying them. A few days earlier, I had heard a few tantalizing snippets from LZ-2 courtesy of a friend's older brother; I knew instantly that I needed to hear more.

After entering the store and browsing for a few minutes, I mustered up sufficient courage to head to the counter with the Zeppelin and ask to listen to it. All was musical bliss for a few minutes. Then just as I was really getting into it, about halfway through "What Is and What Should Never Be," the clerk decided I'd heard enough and rudely interrupted my listening session with a "get lost kid" look on his face. I surprised him by pulling out my lawn-mowing cash and buying the album. I pedaled home furiously, as fast as I could, and slapped my first LP onto the family Garrard Autoslim, which I wrote about in Spin Doctor #11.

Already at age 9, I was a budding audiophile. I constantly cleaned and cared for my new treasure, using a brush and a clear cylindrical plastic bottle of blue record cleaner fluid I got from somewhere. As I cleaned, I got a few whiffs of that fresh-smelling blue cleaning fluid, which was probably about a quarter pure alcohol and was likely giving my 9-year-old kid brain a bit of a buzz. Fifty-four years later, I still own that record, but when I play it today, it kind of sounds like I'm listening through a bowl of Rice Krispies. So much for 9-year-old kids and their record-care skills.

As I got older and my record collection grew, I became more judicious with my record cleaning activities, graduating through brushes, cleaning cloths, and potions until one day I read about a machine made just for cleaning records. In the 1970s, the Keith Monks Record Cleaning Machine sounded like something that would make Rube Goldberg proud. I didn't see one in action until a decade later, when my friend Alan was visiting my family at our new home in Geneva, Switzerland. Alan owned Desertshore Records, the campus record store at Syracuse University, where I was a student. One day, he was complaining that he couldn't find a really good way to clean used records when they came into the store, so I told him about the mysterious Keith Monks machine I had read about years earlier. Determined to check one out, we located an audio store in town that offered a Keith Monks record cleaning service and headed there with a rare German Rolling Stones record Alan had just bought at the Geneva flea market.

The store's owner showed us a beautiful dual-deck Keith Monks machine. Alan and I were blown away by its intricate scrubbing and vacuuming process. Alan was convinced and soon bought himself a simpler, single-deck Keith Monks machine. After a couple of years, Alan let me borrow it for a while, and I used it to clean hundreds of my own records.

The original Keith Monks record cleaner was launched in the late 1960s as a more practical implementation of a machine called the Record Doctor. The Record Doctor was invented and first demonstrated in 1965 by Percy Wilson, technical editor of The Gramophone. When the BBC began to broadcast in static-free FM, they found that the condition of their records was far more critical than with lower-fidelity AM broadcasts, so they were looking for a way to keep their records in better shape. Wilson answered the call and started working with engineers at the BBC along with Keith Monks to create a more practical version of the insanely complex Record Doctor. While it was originally intended for professional use only at music archives, broadcasters, universities, and record stores, by the mid-1970s word was getting out. Keith Monks cleaning machines were starting to show up in the listening rooms of well-heeled audiophiles, especially in the United States.

Keith Monks effectively had a monopoly in the market for high-tech record cleaning machines until around 1981, when two American companies, VPI and Nitty Gritty, both launched consumer-oriented record cleaners. These machines simplified the process further, replacing the vacuum arm and nozzle that swept slowly across the record with a vacuum slot that covered the entire width of the record simultaneously. A downside was that the powerful vacuum pumps needed to do this well were very loud. Noise remains a problem that plagues slot vacuum-cleaning machines to this day.

This record cleaner sucks!
With any type of cleaning process, whether it's for dishes, cars, or records, it's always important to ask yourself where the dirt is going. The problem with my childhood blue cleaning fluid and brush method was that the dirt mixed with the fluid to create a kind of slurry, which I then pushed around the record with the brush until the fluid evaporated, leaving most of the dirt behind. A vacuum-type cleaning machine suspends the dirt in the fluid, then sucks the fluid away, taking the dissolved gunk with it and leaving the record dry and clean. This is the basic principle behind all vacuum-type record cleaners, whether they're the string-and-nozzle type like the Keith Monks or the slot-and-tube type still made today by VPI, Nitty Gritty, and now a host of other companies.

The market for record cleaning machines continued to expand during the 1980s, but as interest in vinyl waned in the 1990s, Keith Monks started to wind down his business, eventually switching to a special-order-only approach. VPI and Nitty Gritty soldiered on, and I bought a VPI HW-17F for myself in around 1990. That machine served me well for almost 30 years. I loved using it despite the noise!

Keith Monks—the man—died in 2005, but that was not the end of the Keith Monks record cleaner. Buoyed up by the revival of interest in vinyl, Keith's son Jonathan Monks rekindled his late father's company in 2010 and now offers a full line of record cleaners. But that's a story for another day.

There's another story, of Terry O'Sullivan and Loricraft, who have been keeping Percy Wilson's Record Doctor flag flying since the early 1990s with their PRC Professional Record Cleaners, which I will be covering soon.

In 2009, just as the vinyl revival was kicking into high gear, an entirely new way to clean records came onto the market. The Vinyl Cleaner from a German company called Audio Desk Systeme Gläss worked in a fundamentally different way from all prior cleaning machines, using a process called cavitation to clean the record grooves. The record-playing area is lowered into a tank of plain water, where ultrasonic transducers blast the water with ultrahigh-frequency energy, creating microscopic bubbles that violently implode when they meet a hard surface like a record. This implosion creates tiny jets of water that effectively scrub the hard surface, removing any dirt or other debris. The process can be highly effective, seeming to reach deep into the record groove, where more conventional record cleaners tend to be less effective.

After the Audio Desk Systeme came out, I got my hands on one and was truly impressed by both its effectiveness and ease of use. All was well for a few years, but eventually it quit working, and the repair options seemed to be difficult and expensive. Someone offered me another Audio Desk Systeme, this time the revised Vinyl Cleaner Pro that was supposedly more reliable, but it soon failed as well. By this time, cavitation-type cleaners had become a popular category, and several new manufacturers like Klaudio, Kirmuss, and Degritter all had their own, along with a host of home-brew solutions using accessorized off-the-shelf ultrasonic baths.

Most of the purpose-built ultrasonic machines are expensive, selling for thousands of dollars, but that norm was broken when a Hong Kong–based company called Happy Well launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2020 for a machine to be called the HumminGuru HG01 (footnote 1). With an early-backer price of a little over $300, the HumminGuru was a 10th the cost of the fancy European machines, but were they any good? Kickstarter launches can be sketchy. A few friends whose interest was piqued by the HumminGuru's bargain price rolled the dice, and their reports were universally positive.

Fast-forward a few years. HumminGuru has introduced a follow-up machine, the HumminGuru NOVA HG05. In the US, HumminGuru sells it through their Amazon store, where as I write this the NOVA is $839.99, while the original HG01 remains available for $599.99. That's a big jump from the original Kickstarter price, but it's a bargain in the world of purpose-built ultrasonic record cleaners. As with many Amazon stores, the prices are liable to frequent fluctuations due to changes in the exchange rate and other factors. It's also possible to buy directly from HumminGuru's website; I found that you can save about $100 by going with that route, depending on the exchange rate at the time of purchase.

---

Footnote 1: HumminGuru, Happy Well International Enterprise, Ltd. Rm. 1202. 12/F New Mandarin Plaza, Tower B, No. 14 Science Museum Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Email: support@happywell.com.hk. Web: humminguru.com.