TechRadar Verdict

A cost-effective way of renovating old vinyl, with ease of changing fluid a big plus. Noisy operation is the drawback. Recommended

Pros

+
Good cleaning
+
Quite fast
+
Easy to change fluid

Cons

-
Noisy

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There are considerably dearer and fancier record cleaning machines on the market, but the Moth Record Cleaning Machine follows the same basic principles as all of them.

You spread a cleaning fluid over the disc then vacuum it off together with all kinds of dirt.

There are various reasons why this machine is cheaper than most, and if £450 is too much, you can save a couple of hundred by building it from a kit.

One of those reasons is that you have to apply cleaning fluid to the disc manually. This means pouring some from the supplied dropper bottle onto the disc surface and spreading it around with the supplied brush.

It's less convenient than simply pushing a plunger but with practice doesn't take much longer, and it has the advantage that experimenting with different fluids is much easier.

Dirty fluid is vacuumed off from below as the disc rotates slowly, and this takes about the same time as most machines – a minute or so per side. The vacuum pump, which sounds a lot like a domestic vacuum cleaner (and probably is – heck, that's what I would use!), provokes my one reservation about the machine: it's so noisy, at about 92dB, that one should wear ear defenders while using it.

The suction tube needs a little prompting to lift up and stick to the disc's underside, but this soon becomes habit, and results seem to me every bit as good as other machines I've used over the years.

With an efficient workflow, 20 discs per hour can be cleaned – about average for most machines.

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