To Loricraft users

Tbg, as a happy and experienced AudioTop user, would you be willing to help me understand where I may have gone wrong with it? My experience with it, while by no means bad, has not been quite as wonderful as yours. This may have to do with the fact that I am playing my records on a not quite so fabulous turntable (Rega P3) or with the fact that I am using the Vinyl 1 all by itself (unable as I am to talk myself into paying $350 for the whole system) or perhaps with the fact that, with Vinyl 1 running $150 a bottle, I can't quite bring myself to use it as lavishly as perhaps it needs to be used--and as it is quite volatile, it does seem to want to be used *very* lavishly. Although the directions call for it to be left on the record surface for a couple of minutes, unless I spill quite a bit on--and by quite a bit I mean two or three times as much as I would use of an RRL fluid--it evaporates before its soaking time is up. Because of its volatility too I refrain from scrubbing with DD brushes--too much surface area for the fluid to evaporate from--but try to get by with LAST brushes instead. Even so, given the time it takes for the Loricraft head to traverse the radius of the record, I am not always sure there is significant fluid to be vacuumed up by the time the head reaches the record's periphery and fear that the fluid has largely evaporated, leaving its load of too briefly dissolved junk behind.

Does any of this correspond to your experience at all? And how ever in the world do you manage to use the AudioTop in an atomiser without having it all evaporate before it hits the record?

Susan

Yes, Vinyl1 is volatile. Vinyl2 is much more volatile, however. Are you speaking of Vinyl1, the cleaner? I have found 8 spritzes will allow me to use the brush and go around perhaps ten times. I use an old Optrix bottle for this. I do not pay attention to the leave on 3 minute routine for the reason you say. Also I gave up on the DD brushes for the reason you say. I do use the nylon brush provided.

I too worry about the lead in grooves, but I have found that I can see that liquid is being removed by the vacuum to the edge.

Perhaps having greater humidity in Texas explains my having less problem with evaporation.

I must say, also, that the Vinyl2 adds significantly to extracting the music most fully.

Too bad this stuff is so damn expensive. It far surpasses anything else I have tried.

Tbg
The outside-in method is like playing LPs, place the arm at the start of the LP, not on the side past the spindle. The arm will still move from left to right.

In practice I've found that the inside-out method produces the best results.

Tbg
Ops, correction, I meant the arm will move from right to left. Eeek, brain thinking faster than fingers type...

Tbg, yes, it is the cleaner alone of the AudioTop system that I am using. I would have liked to try the Vinyl 2, but I doubted I would be able to get it onto the record surface before it evaporated, and the price made experimentation impracticable. Probably I should either have gone whole hog or stayed away completely, and between the two the latter would have made more sense, since other things about my system need more urgent attention than the last degree of perfection in vinyl cleaning. But cleaning, at least as I find myself doing it, is sufficiently laborious that I want to do it right once and for all, not so much so for the sake of the difference I can hear now (though of course that matters) as for the sake of the difference I hope I may be able to hear later with whatever I end up getting to take the Rega's place. Already the thought of all those lps I cleaned when I was first starting out, when I believed a single brief scrubbing was all they needed, weighs upon me. How common is it, I wonder, for people to clean their records to the imaginary standard of a system they don't have yet and may indeed never have?

I can well believe that AudioTop behaves more reasaonably in Texas. Here (Buffalo) it's 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and if I hadn't been simmering a pot of beans all afternoon the air would be like broken glass.