This.
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At one point, when I was very, very bored during my 6 month long covid thing I had one of @Spider s Velvet Vortex machines in addition to a vacuum machine and went through nearly all my vinyl collection the results were amazing on the stuff that wasn’t actually fucked,
Ultrasonic is great, but you still need a rinse and dry cycle so something like an Okki is essential imho.
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This could be a long one:
The Audio desk is more of a scrubbing machine (it has x4 automated rollers that scrub the turning record) I can detect little if any ultrasonic action what so ever. The machine holds 4.5L of distilled water!!!. The filtration system is very basic (*Critical with ultrasonic if you don’t want to bathe your records in their own dirt (Which is then dried back onto the record.) You can’t just leave the water in the tank for the occasional clean so the running cost with roller /filter / and water changes should be considered. Build quality is OK. The drying cycle is hit & miss sometimes leaving a smear - This frankly is uncool. I believe more recent machines have some improvement but it still falls behind the Degritter see below
The Loricraft is the fastest clean by a factor of x3 which is handy if you want to clean a load fast - It spins at 90RPM Bio-directional with a vacuum nozzle running on a thread allows for ‘precision suction’ - apart from being a joy to type this is a big win.
VPI’s, Okki’s etc use a suction tube which is flat (Records aren’t flat with a raised rim meaning uneven suction (This sucks) but more importantly the felt strips are liable to wear - You will only know the exquisite pleasure of this when you smear residual strip glue over the surface of a £1000 LP.
The Loricraft doesn’t need liters of water and the running costs are low as is the maintenance. The downside is you clean one side then flip it over to place it straight onto the mat that has just has an uncleaned side on it (re-contamination is a thing)
The Degrtter MK II has x4 transducers, the unit is programmable meaning rinse / wash and drying can be programmed in a variety of ways. The transducers also vary in frequency which allows for increased and improved cavitation (Bubble’s going bang in differing sizes). The build quality is excellent. The dry cycle is excellent. It holds 1.5L of water and the filtration system is considerably better than the Audio Desk. I still feel the filtration and drying function are inferior to a groove vac. It does come with a spare detachable water tank so you can run a purified water only rinse after cleaning which is good.
The ideal for a filthy record is a deep scrub, an ultrasonic clean and a vacuum dry cycle. There was a manufacturer in China that made something close to this but it wasn’t quite perfected.
In short like life there are trade offs even when doing something as simple as cleaning a record.
*…Any ultrasonic without filtration will be blow or air drying the dirt it just bathed in back onto the record. - Test: take a drop from the tank of cleaner and place it on a mirror, the next day, following evaporation, you will note the residue - It’s this that is drying back onto your record without decent filtration.
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Be interested in the results if someone took a record that had been through a cycle and let that drip onto a mirror to see what the residue is.
Thanks for this. Ties in with my thoughts, and given the drying portion seems not to work that well on ultrasonic machines I wonder if scrub and clean on my project machine, followed by ultrasonic and then a final vacuum dry on the project would be the way forward for troublesome LP’s
Yes, the other thing with ultrasonics really is the quality of the transducers, how they are positioned and if frequency can be varied to create and micro berserk situation inside the grooves. The Hummin Guru is an example of form over function here as the transducers are meepy.
What ever dripped off the record would be the same fluid as in the tank (where the record bathes in the fluid)
I have one of these which does a pretty decent job but I often wonder if I used it in conjunction with an ultrasonic I might get better results 
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A friend of mine just bought a new degritter. I’ll go check it out!
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The guy behind the Matrix set up Okki Nokki. I was a dealer for Okki when they first came out. As a machine at it’s price point it does an OKKi job. Much of the cleaning is down to the brush used (Scrub) and the fluid recipe. The tips of the supplied brush (Or VPI) are not capable of reaching the base of the grooves - The ultrasonic face brush from China posted about ages ago can however) The vac tube is a weak point and they are noisy as fuck. If you fancied a splurge the Degritter is quite something else (DM for further discussion)
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The MKII is the one to beat right now in terms of ultrasonics.
Matt, we can’t all afford/invest what you can write off to HMRC
So, as you actually sell records in a vaguely professional basis, would you be opposed to a regime that goes Knosti (scrub) , Ultrasonic (Velvet or whatever), rinse, and vacuum thing?
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It’s all going to depend on how soiled the record actually is. Used records often have fag tar films on the surface. Whilst they may look OK they are often pretty nasty. If the record looks clean or is new, ultrasonic and a pure water → vac would be cool. If it’s got finger oils / tar / jizz or unidentified Satan on it then scrub first. Even the Degritter suggests wiping with the supplied cloth before cleaning a really janked out record. distilled water & Isopropyl with suffricant go a long way to loosening tars / oils / etc
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Yeah pure ultrasonic doesn’t do it for me.
I buy a few records from a local specialist, and they ultrasonic clean their better stuff, but it doesn’t ever seem to clear things like
Oily fingerprints and the like, so I end up giving it a scrub, suck, rinse and suck on the machine before playing.
Scrubbing brushes VPI vs Cheapo vibrating Chinaman face brush
You will note the face brush has much finer filaments and is also considerably softer - This is cool because you can scrub the run out grove with the Chinese brush - The VPI however will mark it. Scrubbing hard fast and long with a decent fluid can shift most things.
Jesus what has become of me?
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The goat hair brush I use doesn’t seem to leave marks on the runout.
What you really want is some silver tipped badger!
The Goats hair brushes loose their fibers quite easily and are often too soft to actually scrub. (The downward force bending the bristle rather than forcing the tips down into the groove.)
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Sorry Matt, I was being a proper twat there.
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I find that’s how it often goes
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FWVLIW, I tested one of THESE a while back and there was nothing that it didn’t resurrect; even the first pressing of Fatboy Slim’s You’ve come a long way baby that appeared to have been stored at the bottom of the Manchester Ship Canal. It was marginally harder to use than a hammer and built like a lorry too.