“Al: Just discovered you site tonight and have been happily reading your commentaries and exploring your links for the last couple of hours. I expect to lear a lot from you and your correspondents and will contribute what expertise I can offer. I have been collecting jazz and classical records for 30 years. Am a member of IAJRC and a frequent bidder on eBay and mail order auction lists. I have about 4,000 LPs and 3,500 CDs. Mine is not the largest library, but it’s the one I want to have because the items in it are a picked lot. I specialize in small group Swing, Cool and Hard Bop. Particularly dig mainstream tenor saxophonists active from ’50 to ’70 and their modern successors. In your 7/01/05 Riffs you suggested eBay sellers should buy a professional record cleaner. I don’t plan to auction off my collection, but I would like to get such a machine, in order to clean some of my LPs. Do you or any of your readers know where I can buy one? Best, John Herr.”

I replied that I’m very happy with my VPI cleaner, the HW-16.5, which sells for $500 or so. I recommended he do a Google search on record cleaners and, specifically, VPI. In doing my own search I discovered some record cleaners in the $3,000 and up range. Curious if anyone out there has ever used one of these high-end cleaners and whether they do that much more to clean up the sound than the $500 models. If you have any comments, post them on the site.