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CleanerVinyl.com products are designed by vinyl enthusiasts for vinyl enthusiasts and made in the USA. This blog focuses on vinyl record cleaning and related topics. Enjoy the blog!

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

New Before/After Video: Listen to Kraut-Jazzer Volker Kriegel Before and After Ultrasonic Cleaning

At CleanerVinyl.com we collect a lot of jazz albums. Our business really started out of necessity...our collection grew and we needed to clean the records. And our initial prototype became our first commercial product. The CleanerVinyl One (which has recently been updated and became the EasyOne).

Anyway, recently, we started expanding our collection of 'Kraut-Jazz' and one of this genre's most important musician, Volker Kriegel, has our full attention. We recently bought his album "House-Boat" that he recorded together with Wolfgang Schlüter in 1978 on the MPS (Musik Produziert im Schwarzwald - Music Produced in the Black Forest...;-) label.


This album came via Discogs and was listed as near mint ("NM"). We usually like to buy NM if it is at all affordable, since a good 'mechanical condition' is always the beast starting point before reconditioning an album with your ultrasonic cleaner.

When we received the album, visual inspection yielded a nearly perfect surface, no scratches and very few minor scuffs, probably from the original plain paper inner sleeve (of course we replaced that with a nice Mofi sleeve after we cleaned it!). While looking great, it played pretty rough, though. Indicating that this album probably spent some time in a basement or dusty attic. This made this record a nice test case for a CleanerVinyl Before/After video. You will be surprised how nice this almost 40 years old record sounded after we took it off our EasyOne demo unit, that we like to use for a quick clean of a single record on site.

We decided to use the fairly quiet track "Are You Really Living Next to Me?" on Side A for the demo. In the video below we first play a few seconds of the as-received record, and then we play the entire track recorded after the cleaning process. Enjoy!


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