Vinyl care

Washing records is a very good idea, certainly not an excessive precaution. Especially with a newly bought record, it is important to make it anti-static with a good cloth and good cleaning materials. Straight from the factory you will notice that the record crackles when you take it out of the paper sleeve. The aim is for the vinyl to become anti-static, because that prevents ticks. There are small washing machines such as the Okki Nokki, and there are also large, very expensive but, mind you, very good machines, such as those from Clearaudio. There are other brands too, but I have not looked into those myself. Once the records have been washed, you put them in a sleeve from Nagaoka, a Japanese sleeve company. These are special anti-static sleeves that keep the vinyl nice and pristine and stop it from scratching. We have been using those sleeves for more than 35 years. There are other brands, but you would have to try those out first.

There are also inexpensive kits you can use to clean your records. One example is Knosti. Such kits don't clean as deeply as a machine, but for the money they are worthwhile.

For most dust you can simply blow it away. If you want to clean the stylus properly, you do that with a special stylus brush or with a liquid stylus cleaner. What matters here is that you always move in one direction, from back to front.