I really didn’t plan on writing yet another vinyl-related editorial this month. I promise, I didn’t. But as I said in my recent review of the Record Doctor X record-cleaning machine, I still have a lot to learn about the format, and I’m struggling with finding good sources of information beyond my own compatriots here on the SoundStage! Network, who—despite their knowledge and wisdom—are finite in number and experience and can’t possibly have tried it all. But so far, most advice I’ve gotten from people outside our group has turned out to be quite bad. Live and learn, right?
I’ll give you one example directly related to the Record Doctor. As soon as some old vinyl fans learned that I was getting into the whole record-cleaning aspect of the hobby, and that I owned a Record Doctor VI purchased with my own scratch, many of them told me to throw out the RxLP Record Cleaning Solution that came with the machine and replace it with something better. But what?
One recommended something called The Groovinator, but when I tried to buy that, my order was nearly immediately canceled. The most common recommendation, though, was for Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s Super Record Wash (not the Super Deep Cleaner), which I was assured would do a better job.
Better in what way? No one could tell me. And I should have been immediately skeptical, given that I had zero complaints about the RxLP solution. But FOMO gets the best of us, and I’d run out of fluid and needed more. Plus, I’ve conceded several times now that I’m a rank newb when it comes to vinyl, and I need a helping hand sorting this stuff out.
Anyway, after digging around online for information and coming up lacking, I perused Amazon user reviews and discovered that the MoFi Super Record Wash was highly lauded, with one review comparing its performance favorably to the Record Doctor solution I needed to replace:
After using the Record Doctor fluid, my records came out with a noticably [sic] muffled sound, no matter how many times I rinsed them. This fluid actually managed to remove whatever residue was left by the Record Doctor fluid and appears to have come off completely after a couple of spins in the RCM with distilled water. I’m admittedly no expert, but my records definitely sound better to me after cleaning them with this and the SCV mark III. Very happy.
Yeah. No. Turns out, the stuff is infinitely inferior to the bottle of cleaner that came with my Record Doctor VI in every meaningful sense. After cleaning a mere three records, I set that bottle aside and ordered more of the Record Doctor RxLP. And as I was telling SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider about all of this, he encouraged me to write about it. But what is there to say, really? What substance do I have to offer aside from my own anecdotal experience that one cleaning solution did a great job and another sucked eggs?
But I quickly realized that when I went to purchase the MoFi Super Record Wash, I failed to do the one thing I recommend that people do when trying to determine whether a review is trustworthy or not. I didn’t ask one simple question—a question I always ask when reading reviews: does this person demonstrate an understanding of how this product category works? It’s so much a part of my philosophy that it was the first thing to spring to mind when Matt Bonaccio asked me what I look for in a good review.
So why did that philosophy fail me when it came time to replenish my disc wash? Honestly, it’s because so much of my vinyl experience to date has been vibes- and experience-driven that it didn’t even occur to me to stop and think about how record-cleaning juice should work on a fundamental level.
Let’s think this through for a minute. What do you actually want record-cleaning fluid to accomplish? First things first, of course, it needs to break up or dissolve or otherwise attack any gunk on your records. But, of course, you don’t want any full-strength detergent or solvent on your precious LPs, and you want something to keep all of that ook suspended until it can be wiped or vacuumed away, so most of your record-cleaning juice is going to be water with no contaminants in it—in other words, distilled water.
And, of course, if you’ve ever belly-flopped into a swimming pool or watched a mosquito tiptoe across a puddle, you know that the surface tension makes the molecules at the boundary between liquid and air act like kids locking arms in a game of Red Rover. So to make sure the cleaning goodies within that distilled water get down into the itsy-bitsy grooves of your records, you need some sort of surfactant or wetting agent to break the cohesion. Things can get more complex from there, but them’s the basics.
And those basics explain perfectly why the MoFi Super Record Wash did such a poor job of cleaning my records compared with the Record Doctor cleaning solution that came with my machine. The images below tell a story.
This first shot was taken after I’d sprinkled two drops of the MoFi Super Record Wash on the left side of the frame and two drops of the Record Doctor RxLP on the right. Perhaps 20 seconds passed between the application of the MoFi drops and the RD drops. About three seconds passed between the application of the RD drops and the snapping of the photo. But even in that short time, you can see that the RxLP has already started working its way down into the grooves of the record.
This image was taken precisely 38 seconds later, and you can see that maybe half of the Record Doctor RxLP had seeped into the valleys of the record to do its work, even without the application of the goat-hair brush you’re supposed to use to spread the liquid around. I didn’t take any follow-up photos for reasons that are a mystery to me, here in the future. But I let the two liquids sit for another five minutes, and the MoFi was still perched stubbornly on the surface of the grooves in the form of two distinct drops, completely lacking the little tendrils of runaway liquid that indicate a surfactant at work. The Record Doctor fluid, on the other hand, had turned into a glistening, raised sheen that could only be seen with a raking light.
Armed with that knowledge, I went back to Amazon and filtered the reviews to view only those containing the word “surfactant,” and what do you know? They’re all one-star reviews.
In other words, if I had simply sat down long enough to think about how a cleaner should work on a physical and chemical level, I could have saved myself $29 and a few glossy records that still sounded like the spine of a chiropractic victim. Because the people using words that indicate a minimum basic understanding of the way this stuff works had already tried their best to warn potential buyers off of MoFi’s solution. But they were drowned out by the legion of five-star reviews praising the stuff as the best thing since the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018.
I mean, to be fair, Mobile Fidelity also tried to warn me with this bit of apologetics in the fine print of the product description:
While Super Record Wash may not spread out over your LP surface like other record-cleaning solutions, its low-surface-tension water composition is exactly what you want in a solution. Why? The low-surface-tension water not only lifts the debris from the record, it actually holds the debris so that it can be safely and effectively vacuumed away from your record. By contrast, high-surface-tension solutions allow the debris to flow back into the record groove, leaving behind debris, where it can leave a sonic signature and mar performance.
What a load of unmitigated codswallop, especially for a product that advertises itself as being intended for use in vacuum-powered record cleaners. How’s it supposed to hold the debris if it can’t reach down into the grooves to grab that debris in the first place? Maybe MoFi’s other record-cleaning solutions actually do the job they’re advertised to do, but I’ve lost any trust in the brand I might have ever had, so I’m not particularly motivated to find out.
Getting back to those five-star reviews that led me so astray, though, I ran the Super Record Wash listing on Amazon through ReviewMeta, which does a more thorough analysis than the quick-and-dirty FakeSpot breakdown, and found a higher-than-normal number of reviews from brand monogamists and brand loyalists—people inclined to believe that MoFi can do no wrong. There aren’t enough of these to count as red flags, but they certainly erode confidence and start to build a case for why these user reviews steered me so wrong.
Look, I’m not here to beat up on Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. Nor am I here to berate those citizen reviewers who left five-star reviews for a crappy product, evidently because they’d never tried anything better. And who knows? There may be a record-cleaning solution out there that trounces the Record Doctor stuff that works so well for me.
What I’m trying to do is arm you with the weapons I’ll be using to dissect reviews of record-related things in the future. And you can use these armaments when casting a skeptical gaze at speaker reviews or amp reviews or CD transport reviews or whatever.
As I said above, the number one thing you can ask yourself is, “Does the reviewer seem to understand how this product category works?” That doesn’t mean you have to full grok it yourself, mind you, although that helps. But if a review of an amplifier mentions how muscular its bass performance is without discussing the impedance and electrical phase characteristics of the speakers attached to it, that review isn’t arming you with the information you need to know whether it will sound remotely the same with your speakers.
Sadly, most audio reviewers don’t seem to have a clue how any of this stuff works. They plug a piece of kit into their system, listen to their favorite music, and tell you how it all affected their fee-fees. And all of this is made worse by the “different, therefore good” phenomenon that plagues our industry.
Far too many new speakers claim to revolutionize the way transducers work. Far too many high-end audio reviewers are all too eager to proclaim that this particular class-AB amp just doesn’t operate in any way that resembles any class-AB amp before it, yet somehow it’s still class AB.
I get the need for this, mind you. It’s pandering. How do you appeal to customers who’ve been led astray and convinced that feedback is bad in amplifiers? Well, you just make an amp that eschews certain forms of feedback and rake in the dough—never mind that the whole premise is flawed.
And in my opinion and mine alone, this may explain what MoFi is doing with this silly record-cleaning fluid that obstinately refuses to do one of the three things any record-cleaning fluid needs to do. Otherwise, why would they proudly announce as much, then turn around and bury that boasting in the tiniest font possible?
So in short, you want an easy hack for figuring out who you can trust when it comes to all of this stuff? Well, with regard to record-related stuff, it ain’t me—at least not yet. I don’t have the experience, although I’m working on it. But in general, it’s not easy. It requires a good Baloney Detection Toolkit. It requires some rudimentary understanding. It requires some research.
But you want an easy hack for knowing who not to trust? That’s much simpler. Anyone who claims that literally everyone else is doing it wrong deserves your skepticism and should be forced to work at least twice as hard to convince you of their assertions.
With all that said, one of the things I love most about writing for SoundStage! is the community that has built up around it, and I have no doubt I’ll get oodles of emails from readers recommending a better record-cleaning solution. Here’s all I ask before you click to send: don’t just tell me that every other solution sucks except for the one you love. Instead, show me that you understand the job a record cleaner needs to do, and tell me why your favorite does it better. Or tell me why it works just as well, but for less money. But don’t implore me to just trust you, bro. Because at this point, I’m running low on trust.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
