How to Clean a Record
For collectors, cleaning records can become a meditation on history.
By Michelle Delgado
Illustrations by Lenora Yerkes
On a December evening in 2017, I hurried up Connecticut Avenue to retrieve $20 from an ATM.
When I checked my phone, my breath fogged the air; I had just enough time to commute back to Southwest Waterfront, where I planned to meet my neighbor in our building’s lobby. Earlier that day, she had posted a tempting offer on our community forum: a mystery box of 40 records.
By the time I hurried home from L’Enfant, night had settled and she was waiting for me. “Thanks,” she said, pocketing my money and hefting the heavy cardboard box into my arms. Alone in my apartment, I surveyed my new treasures. Before, my record collection had been small — a half-dozen I picked up at local shows, plus a crate full of Allman Brothers, Springsteen, and Neil Young albums passed down by my uncle. Now, I flipped through the mystery stack, looking for names I recognized: Sufjan Stevens, George Harrison, Bob Marley, James Taylor. My neighbor’s cat appreciated these records, too; tumbles of short white hair drifted under my couch. At night, the music filled the studio where I lived by myself, giving the impression that I had company.
A few weeks later, I brought a date back to my apartment and pointed to my shelf of records. Pick something, I suggested, cracking open a beer. He knelt to flip through them and selected Michigan, the album that kicked off Sufjan Stevens’ abandoned 50 states project. We listened to the spare, reverent opening track, gentle piano doubling the vocal melody. There was the heady, unspoken sense of something beginning. An hour and a half passed this way, minutes ticking past midnight and into a new morning. In the silence that settled after the last track, we finally kissed.
By mid-January, time began to blur. The first date led to a second, a third, all in the same week. We worked in the same office but kept to ourselves. One unseasonably warm weekend, we wandered across Alexandria, from his apartment to a record store called Crooked Beat.
Once an Adams Morgan staple, Crooked Beat was besieged by rising costs and declining conditions. Rats tunneled in, posing a threat to owner Bill Daly’s health. Finally, facing sky-high rent in the District, Daly reluctantly relocated to Virginia and hoped customers would follow. Today, Crooked Beat’s customers descend a few steps into neat rows of wooden crates, as if entering a public conversation pit defined by library voices and a soundtrack of ’80s rock. The store’s red walls are covered in a shaggy bark of posters: Nirvana, the Pixies, Sleater-Kinney, Joy Division. The warm overhead lights lull shoppers into a drowsy stupor, soundtracked by the hypnotic tap-tap-tap of collectors flipping through the stacks.
To the right, a long counter runs half the store’s length. Most days, that’s where you’ll find Daly, a quiet but authoritative presence in a soft T-shirt. He keeps his light-brown hair short and maintains an encyclopedic knowledge of the vinyl industry’s inner workings. On Facebook, he posts nuanced updates on industry news — recently, the nitty-gritty details of vinyl distribution.
“Old or dirty records come with what Daly calls bacon fry: staccato snaps and pops that punctuate the music. ”
Periodically, Daly disappears for a few days on mysterious trips to restock the store. He’ll drive south, to a city where a converted movie theater houses over 2,000 vinyl records in a cool, dim space the length of a football field. Or he’ll drive north to a place where a collector has stashed about a million records, some filed on shelves 15 feet off the ground. He’ll scale a special ladder to get a look at those top shelves, or lie on his belly on the floor to thumb through records on the bottom. (The exact locations of these caches remain a trade secret.)
Once Daly returns from a trip, his work has only just begun. Before inventory hits the store, he painstakingly checks each purchase for warping and sound quality. He also cleans each record by hand. Whenever the needle jumps, Daly carefully inspects the record, searching for tiny flecks of grime. Old or dirty records come with what Daly calls bacon fry: staccato snaps and pops that punctuate the music. This matters, for more than just aesthetic reasons. The dust, debris, and cat hair that coated my neighbor’s old records risked collecting on my turntable’s delicate needle.
For Daly, cleaning records amounts to archaeology. The records are physical entities that retain traces of their lost environments. Once, he purchased a collection of 15 or 20 records; upon closer inspection, they seemed to have been played during someone’s parties. As Daly reminisced with me, he imagined the records’ previous lives, painting a vivid scene: “They’re drinking beer, maybe someone had too much. Maybe eating chicken or birthday cake.” Nearly invisible morsels of food — cake icing, donut grease, potato chip crumbs — threatened to derail the needle. No matter what causes a record’s dirty state, Daly sees (and hears) it all.
Among hobbyists and shop owners, there isn’t a clear consensus about the best way to go about cleaning vinyl. The one thing everyone agrees on is that isopropyl alcohol — the same ingredient in acetone nail polish remover — is both common and risky. It can strip a record of dirt and oil. But it will also take away the characteristic lushness of a record’s sound, leaving a harsh, tinny echo of the beauty it once offered. This happens because isopropyl alcohol dissolves shellac, accelerating wear and causing a record’s grooves to grow brittle.
One day in 2017, a longtime customer brought Daly a gift. It was a small spray bottle, full of clear solution: a cleaning agent he’d been working with. Daly tested it on a dirty record. Two or three light spritzes, a quick wipe with a microfiber cloth. And just like that, all the grime was gone.
In 2018, the Museum of Science Fiction’s annual Escape Velocity convention celebrated the 50th anniversary of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece about a sentient computer’s voyage to Jupiter. Along with exact reproductions of costumes and set pieces, the museum obtained an original vinyl pressing of the movie’s soundtrack. But like any aging record, the copy was imperfect. “It wasn’t pristine,” recalled Greg Viggiano, who founded the museum in 2013.
Faced with an artifact that needed careful restoration, Viggiano focused his energy on learning everything he could about cleaning vinyl. He began reaching out to experts across the D.C. area, at the Library of Congress and American University’s department of audio technology. “We just started making it a project about how to restore via best practice, best chemistry and then went from there.” Viggiano said.
Viggiano is slight but wiry, with an intense manner and a shock of white hair. On the day we met at Crooked Beat, he wore a long-sleeved rugby shirt with wide white-and-green stripes, seemingly oblivious to the oppressive early summer heat. It was easy to picture him patiently completing the precise steps he described, finessing an archival-grade vinyl cleaner.
Viggiano started with laboratory-grade distilled water, which is free from the minerals and chemicals that lurk invisibly in water from the tap. This, combined with a Dow chemical called Tergitol, make up the basis of his formula. But that’s only the chemistry. “In order to really get record pristine — like, black-hole quiet — you need to use ultrasonic cleaning,” Viggiano says. In this process, records are fully immersed in a warm bath that’s injected with 60 to 80 thousand hertz. The intense frequency shakes grime out of a record’s grooves, gently polishing it clean.
Viggiano spun a brass clamp in his hands as he walked me through step after detailed step. When he began to describe rinsing records with deionized water, he plunked the device down on Daly’s counter. It was an O ring, he explained, used to create a perfect seal around the paper label on an LP, protecting it from the moisture.
Finally, once all that is done, it’s time to dry the record off. Viggiano recommends a special vacuum to suck the water right off, followed by an enzyme rinse, followed by a trip under the microscope to inspect for any lingering traces of grime.
By the time Viggiano embarked on his quest to master record cleaning, his avid record collecting had already led him to Crooked Beat. Before 2016, when Daly’s shop was still located in Adams Morgan, Viggiano considered it a destination worth the trek from his home in Alexandria. And although Daly felt uncertain about Crooked Beat’s future in Alexandria, the news delighted Viggiano. “I was overjoyed,” he said.
As Viggiano’s fascination with record cleaning and preservation deepened, he shared his findings with Daly. The machines that use sonic frequencies to clean vinyl are big and expensive, which is why Crooked Beat doesn’t have one. But Viggiano has access to the machinery, and he loves a challenge. He occasionally lends a hand when Daly is dealing with a particularly messy record.
Viggiano also developed a simplified version of the cleaning process: a high quality spray in a simple plastic bottle, made from diluted Tergitol. He offered the spray to Daly and encouraged him to brand it Clean Beat, a play on the store’s name and logo. He’s done the same with other local shops, hoping it can help the local record scene reap some new profits. And it seems to be working, at least at Crooked Beat. Viggiano’s miracle spray almost immediately became a bestseller, appearing on the shop’s top 10 bestselling items display for months at a time.
But that was two years ago, and building this indie magazine from scratch took longer than I bargained for. I got busy, got more records, got married to my date from the beginning of this essay. When I return to Crooked Beat in January 2020, Clean Beat is no longer on the wall of bestsellers.
But Daly says that’s only because it so often ties for ninth or tenth place. To date, he estimates that he’s sold around 175 bottles, amounting to more than $3,000 in income for the store. As record stores — and all retailers of physical media — adapt to a world of streaming services and digital products, these wins are meaningful. The cleaner’s sales suggest that people aren’t just buying records from local shops such as Daly’s, but also carefully preserving their collections, anticipating years of music and generations to come.
On a clear morning this past February, I dialed the number for Poison Control. A woman with a soothing voice picked up and told me her name is Nancy. “Could you tell me why you’re calling today?” she asked, with the polite and studied patience of a hotline operator.
I told Nancy that I’d been cleaning a record and didn’t realize I’d accidentally spritzed my water bottle. When I took an absent-minded gulp, the taste of soap filled my mouth. I heard Nancy typing as she searched the organization’s database. “Okay,” she said finally. “From what I can tell, you have nothing to worry about.” Even if I had swigged straight from the bottle, the risk of poisoning was slim. To be clear, Nancy didn’t recommend trying this, and neither do I — but it’s comforting to know that Viggiano’s concoction won’t harm me or my records.
My unexpected physical encounter with Clean Beat made my husband and I view it in a new light. In the years that followed that first Sufjan-soundtracked encounter, our shared love of music took us into venues and record shops around the world. We saw Strange Ranger in a Foggy Bottom apartment, then in a pizza shop basement in Baltimore, and bought their entire discography on records and tapes. We pawed through records in Adams Morgan, then Seattle, then Tokyo, our trips becoming more ambitious as our certainty in each other grew. I found an original pressing of my favorite Elliott Smith record; he built a collection of electronic beats and low-key hip hop. The comfort of knowing that Tergitol won’t damage our collection is enhanced by knowing that it’s safe for us, too.
It also reminded me of something that had been on my mind since my initial conversations with Daly and Viggiano. Beneath debates about the best way to clean a vinyl record, there’s something existential at stake. For some collectors, vinyl can and should be reverted to a pristine state. True, pure sound is there, latent beneath the ravages of time. With patience and precise chemistry, preservation and restoration go hand in hand. In Viggiano’s role, this approach was an essential function of his duty to preserve the Museum of Science Fiction’s collections.
But there’s another dimension to this physicality — one that Daly knows well. He isn’t perturbed by the fact that records accumulate physical traces of their histories. In the eye of the beholder, that might be part of their charm. The stray strands of cat hair, the potato chip crumbs, the smear of birthday cake frosting: Records can become a testament to what the collector values and how they live.
In this respect, Clean Beat balances the need for clean records with a process that doesn’t demand much from the average collector. Just a few sprays, a microfiber cloth, and a moment — just long enough to wonder at where those dusty traces came from — to dry.
