So this thing was crowd funded and is now on the market. The Hummin Guru has a lot of function going for it. Dry cycle, water filtration…Oh, it’s less than £500 landed too…
These are good things but this hummin Guru doesn’t seem to humm enough… x2 transducers make it the weakest ultrasonic on the market as far as I know. Seemingly there was a paper written about the effects of ultrasonic cleaning on various plastics that showed the ultrasonic process can damage very similar materials to vinyl but in my limited experience really heavily gunked records don’t clean so well even on variable frequency powerful cleaners in a single cycle (I should add they work very well on lightly soiled or as an after cycle on wet vac’d records.)
There has been some money put into making this thing happen so why drop the ball on it’s ability to actually clean records? @Spider ??? 15 Mins to clean one record is also a long thing (Loricraft = about 2 mins a side with reasonable scrub time)
Not sure if you are supporting ultrasonic or doubting it but what I do know is it doesn’t damage the vinyl. It is a case of using the right machine with the right frequency to clean vinyl.
As far as time to clean goes it depends on how dirty the records are. A new record takes 5mins a really dirty one will take about 12 to 15mins.
I have never thought the time to clean makes much difference the important thing is to clean records thoroughly and improve the sound quality because they are properly cleaned, to me I don’t mind if that is 3 minutes or 15 minutes.
In my experience no other cleaning method is as effective as ultrasonic. It doesn’t have to be expensive I think my Velvet Vortex proves that and there are many happy users.
Last word
Before
Certainly not against ultrasonic cleaning, I was interested to know your thoughts on the Guru only having x2 transducers? The paper I referred regarding potential damage is noted in this film…He is Dutch so bare with him, he does however cover the basics.
I doubt very much if the duration for cleaning would be of concern for the home user. In my case cleaning 2K+ records for fairs 4-5 times a year + personal collection and internet sales necessitates several wet vac machines running simultaneously. Adding ultrasonic 15 min cycles per record would usher in the loss of my remaining hair (As evidenced by Dutch man above).
I had use of one of Tim’s Velvet Vortex machines whist I was off sick and cleaned a good 2 or 3 hundred albums in it.
I only ever found positive results, every record sounded better after cleaning, without exception.
I generally did 3 records at a time for 6 minutes and that worked really well. For part of the time I had the VV I also had a vacuum machine that I used to dry off the solution I used in the VV and then rinse with distilled water, then dry again and that did work really well. The results were really impressive, and didn’t really add much to the cleaning time per disc. But even the records that I cleaned without the vacuum and just let dry in my old Knosti rack were really good.
What I did find was that you had to plan your cleaning sessions because the VV took time to warm up the solution to your desired temperature (but you could probably just warm up your distilled in a pan to cut this down by a quite considerable time). Also if you use Isopropyl it evaporates due to the warm temperature that the machine works at, so you need to factor that in.
I’d like to add / clarify. This Guru post wasn’t about digging out ultrasonic cleaning. Wet Vac Cleaning has some glaring disadvantages too. Tims VV is more powerful and a great product. It was rather poorly aimed at a new offering using less power (Transducers) and why that might be? Could the Guru still be effective?
I’ve had a look at the website. It appears to use 40khz the same as my bath which is good but I would favour three transducers to provide that ultrasonic wave. What would concern me more is the small amounts of liquid used. In my opinion and experience using the 5ltrs of fluid helps to enhance the cleaning properties of ultrasonic cleaning. I’m sure there are differences of opinion but I think the 5ltr bath is the sweet spot.
Also at that price its too good to be true. And when something is too good to be true it generally worries me. It will be interesting to see how reliable they are.
The pay Cheap Pay twice adage often turns out to be true. It seems a lot of the set up here as been about form rather than function. It’s a shame as they have come up with a compact design and gone to the trouble of moldings etc etc but if it’s not actually going to clean a record reliably and sufficiently it misses it’s purpose.
Not the best of review methodologies going on here. I do see the time it takes to just clean one record as a drag - He put the one cycle cleaned record back into the dirty water for round 2 and 3. The dry cycle is a ‘blower’ not a vac so detritus is just blown about in the dutty fluid until it drys back onto the record. This is like taking a bath after your brother and sister have been in it before you, then using their twice used towel to dry off.
All that Matt says is totally right drying by blowing onto the surface just dries detritus back onto what should be clean vinyl.
Clean once and clean right is what I always think.
