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Unless you’re buying them brand-new—and often even then—your vinyl records are probably filthy. New records are staticky and attract dust; old records have been sitting in boxes in other peoples’ basements. Take it from someone who has bought, sold, found, cleaned, and restored some dusty, oily gems: Your records probably need a good bath.
Below you’ll find everything you need to know about getting (and keeping) your wax fresh. Interested in other audio tips? Be sure to check out our list of the best turntables and our guide on how to upgrade your home audio for free or cheap.
Updated March 2025: We added information about ultrasonic cleaning, updated the formatting, and checked links and prices.
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Why Wiping Won’t Work
If you do a quick Amazon search, you’ll find a ton of products that purport to clean vinyl records. Typically, they use sprays and some form of wiping device, like a cloth or pad, to clean the surface. However, vinyl grooves are so small that the fibers of any cloth can’t possibly reach inside. While you might get cleaning liquid into the grooves, getting it back out is pretty hard. This means that the traditional wipe-off or spin-and-clean style devices mostly just spread the dirt around in the grooves.
That’s where vacuum suction or ultrasonic cleaners come in. Fancy record-cleaning machines like this one from Pro-Ject ($450) use a platter and a vacuum system to physically suck the nasty cleaning solution out of the grooves, with a motor that spins the record in two directions. Ultrasonic cleaners use high-frequency sound to essentially shake dirt from the grooves. Both work very well to ensure that the dirt, dust, and grime are actually coming out of the tiny grooves on your record.
Tools of the Trade
If you’re going the suction route, you can buy an all-in-one record cleaner like the one made by Pro-Ject above, or if you’re feeling frugal, you can simply buy one of these awesome attachments ($30) for a small shop vacuum.
Then, all you need is cleaning solution ($35), a cheap paintbrush ($7), a vacuum ($50), and an old record player or spindle to turn the record as you vacuum the solution out of the grooves. Look for old ones at thrift shops, since all you need is a table that physically spins, not that plays music. I have had staggering results cleaning my records using this system, taking crusty old records to shiny clean masterpieces in a few minutes.
If you want to clean records ultrasonically (best for folks who have big collections, because you can clean multiple discs at once), I recommend a mid-tier generic model like this one ($425). (A premium model will run you about twice as much, but it does the exact same thing.) The ultrasonic cleaner vibrates the cleaning solution around the records at a super-high frequency, which helps the grit and grime just fall right off into the cleaning basin as it spins on the included motor. Once clean, you just place them on the included drying rack.
