Blogs & Little Things

G.E.M. Dandy Hydraulic LP Cleaning Apparatus MKII

You can spend a lot of money cleaning your vinyl records if you want, with vacuum or ultrasonic machines costing more than $1000.

While record cleaning is definitely important, I was unwilling to spend this kind of money on a cleaning system. I buy a lot of records used at both brick and mortar stores and on eBay. Mainly because I’m cheap. So a $1k record cleaning machine doesn’t really fit for me. For years I’ve been using a manual pad cleaning system. It worked OK, but never really got the records completely clean. This is probably because this sort of cleaner (and many vacuum cleaners) always leave a residue of cleaning solution on the record.

The G.E.M. Dandy Hydraulic LP Cleaning Apparatus MKII is a totally different animal. It’s basically a pressure washer for your records. The system consists of a record holder that goes in your kitchen sink, with an o-ring sealed spindle to protect thefrom water, a high-pressure water nozzle used to spray the record surface, and a special, very strong cleaning solution. The system costs $169, a small fraction of what even the cheapest vacuum cleaning machines cost. This price includes 16oz of the cleaning solution, adapters to attach the cleaning nozzle to either a hose tap or your sink faucet, and a small bottle of GroOove Lube record treatment with applicator pads. Rather than a written review, I made a video of the system in action.

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In conclusion, I am very happy with this record cleaner. It works very, very well, and any issues that could be caused by washing the records with tap water can be easily eliminated with a distilled water rinse after cleaning. The GroOve Lube is very effective at reducing surface noise and clicks and pops from minor scratches on used records and is totally reversible if you don’t like the results.

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Chris Groppi

Chris Groppi is a radio astronomer and electrical engineer working as an assistant professor at Arizona State University. He received his Bachelor's degree in astronomy from Cornell University in 1997, and his Ph.D. in astronomy with a concentration in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona in 2003. He studies how stars and planets form, and designs and builds millimeter-wave and terahertz receivers for radio telescopes. He became interested in HiFi during high school the first time he listened to a real high-end system (B&W 801s with Mark Levinson electronics). His first system in college was a Headroom headphone amplifier powering Sennheiser HD 580s, and graduated to a real HiFi system in graduate school. His first love has always been 2-channel audio, although his current system has added home theater capability.