LAST Stylus cleaner review

It's usually painfully obvious if the stylus on your LP player is dirty – the sound distorts at climaxes and generally sounds grainy.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that: mistracking due to dirt on the stylus or the disc tends to cause permanent disc damage, because the ultra-hard diamond is now no longer smoothly tracing the groove but is bashing into it periodically, potentially knocking tiny bits of vinyl out of the groove-wall surface and indeed even damaging the stylus itself due to increased local heating.

Cleanliness is therefore essential if precious discs are to be maintained in good condition.

As always, anything is better than nothing, but with the stylus and cantilever assembly being so very fragile, some improvised methods of cleaning can be downright dangerous. A very soft brush with a few drops of suitable solvent has always been an excellent tool for the job and that's what you get here.

You can't just use any old solvent, though, as some have been accused of attacking the flexible suspension that retains the cantilever and this one has been specially formulated to have no such effect.

At the same time, it is sufficiently potent to shift deposits from the stylus and using a powerful magnifier we were able to see that it leaves the diamond clean after just a quick wipe. The bottle of fluid is tiny, but the amount used in each application is really minimal.

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