Are Cheap Ultrasonic Record Cleaners Worth It?

Somebody in r/vinyl inherited thousands of records from a friend who's no longer around, and quite a few had sat in a garage with a leaky roof. Mould on the vinyl. They used to scrub it off with a microfibre cloth and soapy water, which got the records playable, not good, and took forever.

Now they wipe each one with diluted isopropyl and drop it in a cheap ultrasonic tank for twenty-five minutes. Seven of the first eight came out playable, and the one that didn't had been knocked about before it ever went in.

The tank is a Vevor six-litre ultrasonic cleaner, a stainless box sold for carburettors and jewellery with a record spindle bolted on the back. Every few months somebody asks the sub whether it's worth buying, since a purpose-built record machine costs several times as much.

If you've got a crate of grubby second-hand records and you're weighing the cheap tank against washing them by hand, this is what the owners who've run hundreds through one say, including the few it let down.

What is a cheap ultrasonic record cleaner?

An ultrasonic cleaner is a steel tank with transducers under the floor that shake the water faster than you can hear. The shaking makes tiny bubbles, and the bubbles collapsing against whatever's in the bath is what knocks the dirt loose. The one record collectors buy is, as one thread starter put it, a regular ultrasonic cleaner with an add-on that spins the records through the water.

That add-on is a small motor and a spindle. Records go on it with spacers between them and the labels above the waterline, and the stack turns so every part of the groove gets its time in the bath. A purpose-built record machine aims its transducers at the sides of the record. On the cheap tank they face up at the edge of it, says an owner who has both kinds and still finds both work.

The one to look for has two knobs, one for the heater and one for the timer. An owner calls it the dial one, and another, four hundred records in, says to get the non-digital one and not to worry about tank size.

Do ultrasonic record cleaners work?

On dirty used records, yes, and the owners aren't shy about it. One of them has about four hundred LPs, mostly sixties and seventies rock bought used, brushed every time they were played and many of them still filthy. A hundred and fifty had been through the tank when they wrote this.

The difference is remarkable. Some albums that were practically unlistenable due to pops and crackles are now perfectly clean.

u/Jbo-Bear, in r/vinyl

The same comment carries the limit. It won't take out a scratch, only the dirt deep in the groove. An owner two and a half years in says records inherited from their parents, borderline unlistenable, came out shockingly crisp.

On AudioKarma, a forum of long-time hi-fi people, one member put the five hundred or so in their collection through. Albums they'd written off as worn out now play like they've just come out of shrink wrap.

The most useful tally in that thread is from a member who kept score. About half of each batch came out remarkably improved, a quarter went from painful to listenable, and the rest stayed noisy because the noise was scratches.

GadgetGuy's Stephen Dawson reviewed one in 2020 and landed in the same place: "It can do nothing for damage to the grooves, but it certainly cleaned out dirt." His other line is the one to remember: if your records are already clean, there'll probably be no change at all.

How long and how warm do owners run it?

The manual doesn't say, so the sub works it out between themselves. The Reddit owners who name a setting mostly run ten to fifteen minutes at 30°C (86°F), though one of the happiest never uses the heat at all. One owner goes shorter and cooler: no more than twelve minutes at 22 to 25°C.

The AudioKarma regulars sit a little warmer, twelve to twenty minutes at 32 to 36°C (90 to 97°F). The person who ran ninety minutes got told off by everyone who replied.

Whichever you pick, check the water with a thermometer, because the dial isn't the water temperature. One owner set 30°C and measured 38°C. Another had the dial read 32°C when the water was 35°C, on two of the three units they've owned. A third found the sensor had come unstuck from the tank and re-taped it.

The bath also heats itself: half an hour with the heater off gets it past 30°C from the vibration alone.

The other change owners keep making is to slow the spindle. The supply in the box spins the records far too fast for the bath to do its work. Owners swap it for a cheap variable power supply and run the motor at a few volts instead of the full 24, about one turn a minute.

They say it makes a noticeable difference. Not everyone agrees, though: one AudioKarma member measured no difference between one and five turns a minute in their own bath.

Fewer records per run, too. The eight at a time some of Vevor's listings claim would leave little space between them, says the mould rescuer, who does four. The owner four hundred records in does two.

The water isn't filtered, so whatever comes off one record stays in the bath for the next until you change it. The classic-rock owner changes theirs every twenty to thirty records, and an owner in the same thread strains the old water through coffee filters to stretch it. Some owners finish with a rinse in distilled water, by spray bottle or a second tank.

Labels are the last worry. The supplied covers were drawing water in for one owner, though another, fifty records in, has never had liquid near a label. Which labels survive a soaking and which don't is a question the people who wash records in the sink have been through already.

Has it damaged anyone's records?

Four owners say so, and two of their stories come with a fix. One thread is titled "Vevor Ultrasonic Cleaner damaged my records", and what happened in it is less than the title says.

The person who started it had run most of their As through, four or five at a time, twenty-five minutes at 30°C. A record that used to be silent came out noisy for the first track or two, then settled to normal. By daylight they'd found gunk on the stylus and worked out the tank was depositing something on the lead-in.

Their edit ends on "Good news is my albums aren't ruined." A pass through their old Spin Clean got it off, and they know of one other owner with the same thing.

One record warped at 35°C, after which its owner runs the heat at 20°C.

Some of the tanks die young, too: one worked once and never powered on again and went back for a refund.

Set that against the other column. Owners who say they've run about a thousand records through theirs, over a thousand, about nine hundred and almost eight hundred.

On AudioKarma, about eight hundred and fifty with no failures, over five hundred in three years and one member's going on six years of regular use. In four years of that thread, in the posts we read, nobody reports a record the bath harmed. The worry there is heat, and members put the point where vinyl goes soft somewhere near 48°C (118°F).

Four reports of harm against a dozen or so long-run owners, seven of them past five hundred records. Two of the four came after a long or a warm bath. The times and temperatures above are what owners run, not a tested limit.

Who should skip it?

• Your records are already clean and quiet. There's no need to run them through a tank, and the owners who tried it on decent records report the least change. One a year in, who brushes each record in the sink first, says they come out mostly sounding the same. Another recorded three records before and after and heard no improvement.
• The noise is scratches, not dirt. No bath removes damage, and the quarter of each batch that stayed noisy for the scorekeeper above stayed noisy for that reason.
• You've nowhere to put a loud machine. "It has the charm of an industrial deep fryer," says the first reply in the busiest thread about it, and the owners who love it run it in another room with the door shut.
• You want it to dry the record. It won't. Records come out wet and go on a rack, where they gather dust while they dry. Two owners dry theirs with a "vinyl vac", a shop-vac attachment, one of them straight out of the bath.
• You'd rather not buy a machine at all. The paint-pad routine that cleans a crate without a machine costs a few dollars and makes no noise.

Buy the knob-control Vevor, and put a cheap variable power supply and a thermometer in the basket with it. Then start the way the damaged-records poster wishes they had, with a couple of records you wouldn't miss at the short, cool end of what the owners run. Play one before the rest of the crate goes in.