Degritter • Record-Cleaning Machine

" . . . a dependable and extremely convenient cleaning system that works exactly as advertised."

by Vance Hiner | April 22, 2020

et’s clean some records! If you’re like me, that sentence is about as scintillating as Time to sweep out the garage or Let’s organize the junk drawer. In fact, when TAB editor Marc Mickelson once told me that proper record cleaning was an important step on the one true path to analog heaven, my inner slob wasn’t having it. When he regaled me with stories about his multi-thousand-dollar cleaning system, I rolled my eyes and muttered to myself, “Not in my lifetime, buddy.” Music plus tedium does not equal joy in my book. But that was before I upgraded my turntable, cartridge and phono stage. Gradually, all the dust bunnies and decades of grunge embedded in the grooves of my favorite records started announcing their presence. Not only is vinyl a flawed medium but it (as well as a great deal of the equipment associated with it) is in a constant state of degradation. It’s a testament to the sonic charms of phonographic records that such a messy affair could still be going strong after more than a century.

Thanks to great vinyl evangelists like Michael Fremer and Chad Kassem, a whole industry dedicated to the care and protection of our vinyl investments has flourished during the past decade. If it weren’t for this stubborn refusal to abandon a “dying” medium, it’s unlikely that a small group of young entrepreneurs in Tartu, Estonia, would’ve crowd-sourced enough customers in 2018 to fund their quest to build a better mousetrap -- in this case, the Degritter ultrasonic record cleaner.

For those late to the ultrasonic party, a little primer on the subject is in order. Because the grooves in our records are no more than 56 micrometers wide, no brush bristle can reach down into the deepest recesses between those vinyl walls. Until the middle of the twentieth century, vinyl enthusiasts did their best to remove the crud in those spaces with water, cloths, and various cleaning solutions, all of which resulted in varying degrees of damage to a record’s surface (especially in the case of shellac). If you’re especially curious and want some cheap entertainment, check out YouTube for tutorials demonstrating how wood glue can be used to get your records super-duper clean. Nothing could go wrong with that.

According to an article by Mike Bodell in The Vinyl Press, Percy Wilson, a technical editor at the UK’s iconic Gramophone magazine was the person responsible for inspiring the world’s first commercially produced electronic record-cleaning machine, in 1968 -- a string-and-vacuum device sold by Keith Monks Audio. I was surprised to learn that during this same year, Michigan mechanical engineer Richard W. Henes was granted a patent for the world’s first ultrasonic record-cleaning machine. That device was never commercially produced and the idea languished for decades, until finally, in 2009, the world’s first consumer ultrasonic cleaner debuted, Germany’s Audio Desk Systeme vinyl cleaner. Four year’s later, South Korea’s KLAudio unveiled its approach to ultrasonic cleaning with the KD-CLN-LP200.

While I’ve never used an ultrasonic record cleaner, I do own a variety of vinyl-cleaning systems, from the very basic but reliable Spin Clean Mk II to the popular Disk Doctor V vacuum machine, and my current reference, the outstanding, semi-automatic, vacuum-powered Nitty Gritty Mini-Pro 1. Knowing that I was now a full-fledged member of the clean-vinyl congregation, Marc thought of me when Dallas-based audio dealer, Allnic USA distributor and well-known vinyl fanatic, Albert Porter, kept raving about his latest discovery -- the Degritter. Porter’s long-running reference had been KLAudio’s flagship, but when the company announced in 2019 that it would be halting production, he started searching for a worthy replacement. Porter believes the upstarts from Estonia are on to something, so when he offered to send me one of their devices, which he procured for this review, I couldn’t resist the chance to find out for myself.

Right out of the box, the Degritter, with its sleekly modern casing and attractive LED menu, impressed me. In a phone conversation, Porter likened it to a “German toaster,” and that’s a fair description of its appearance. Being a fan of Teutonic industrial design, I enjoy turning its textured dials, watching its menu change and touching the brushed-aluminum casing. Internally, what sets the Degritter machine apart from all of its competitors is the company’s choice to use a 120kHz frequency system powered by a 300-watt amplifier. The company’s founders claim that this frequency is more effective than the 40kHz used by other devices and, consequently, requires no use of brushes or multiple types of cleaning solutions. All you need for the Degritter is distilled water (which the machine degasses to optimize temperature) and you’re ready to go. The unit does come with a bottle of the company’s proprietary cleaning solution for the very dirtiest records but, frankly, I was unable to detect a difference between records I cleaned with or without it. If you have dirtier records than I do, the cleaning solution may be necessary.

In a nutshell, ultrasonic cleaning works like this: cavitation agitates the unit’s cleaning medium (in this case, distilled water), producing massive numbers of microscopic bubbles. The amplifier’s resulting pressure waves cause the bubbles to release heat and produce water jets that gently but thoroughly loosen and remove non-vinyl material from a record’s surface. The Degritter then uses a specialized pump to drain the water and run it through an active filter that removes all pollutants.

According to Degritter’s manual, up to 30 records can be cleaned before the distilled water needs replacement. It’s recommended that the active filter be replaced by the user after 100 record cleanings (five filters come with the unit). While the Degritter is designed to clean 12" vinyl LPs by default (it is not certified to clean shellac records), it can also handle 7" and 10" records with the use of optional adapters that can be purchased separately. One of the niftier features of the Degritter is that it keeps a running count of records cleaned and displays the information on the unit’s easy-to-read color screen -- no more guesswork or fussy logging required.

Operating the Degritter is elegantly simple, but the device’s many features do require close attention to the well-written manual. Theoretically, you can be in business as soon as you fill the plastic reservoir tank with distilled water and let the unit degas the liquid, which takes less than a minute. The operation becomes a bit more involved if you happen to live in relatively humid climate. The Degritter enables users to set the fan power and length of drying time. For my location along the muggy Mississippi, I needed to set the fan to maximum power to get my records thoroughly dry. The lowest setting is whisper quiet and can be used while playing music. The setting I used registered a 75dB “whoosh” on my trusty Radio Shack SPL meter. That’s considerably quieter than the 90dB of higher-pitched noise emitted by my Nitty Gritty Mini-Pro 1.

The tradeoff for those with sensitive ears is that the Nitty Gritty can clean a record in about two minutes and only one minute of that involves noise. By contrast, the shortest duration for a quick Degritter drying cycle is just under two minutes and, in my case, because of the longer drying time I selected, it took three minutes. For fairly filthy discs, Degritter recommends the medium or heavy setting, which can last anywhere from seven to eleven minutes from start to finish, depending upon user preferences. It’s comforting to know that, during lengthier cleaning sessions, the Degritter automatically stops the ultrasonic generator to remove excess heat that might otherwise damage records or the unit itself during cleaning.

To keep all of the various processes functioning at peak performance, Degritter pushes out firmware updates periodically. After download to a laptop of any provenance and transfer to a FAT32 SD card, the update is completed in less than five seconds. The last firmware I downloaded altered the rotation schedule during the cleaning cycle to reduce wear and tear on the internal components, all without reducing the unit’s cleaning effectiveness. The sense I got from day-to-day use of the Degritter was that virtually no aspect of record cleaning and operation had been overlooked. It worked flawlessly.

started my evaluation of the Degritter by cleaning a copy of Analogue Productions’ 45rpm reissue of Ray Brown’s Soular Energy [Concord Jazz/Analogue Productions APJ 268-45]. After cleaning with the unit’s setting on medium, I noticed a bit less noise and grain, sharper string snap, longer piano-note sustain as well as more dynamic punch during “Sweet Georgia Brown.” All of those elements have always been notable on this disc, but after a Degritter treatment I found myself attending to them even more. I experienced similar but less-pronounced sonic revelations when comparing a Spin Clean treatment of an older record and then listening to that same record after a pass through my Nitty Gritty Mini-Pro 1. One principle the Degritter serves to strengthen is this: the cleaner your records are, the more music your stylus can deliver, and the more enjoyment you’ll get out of your record collection.

The most dramatic experience I had while using the Degritter was when I ran my prized Columbia six-eye original pressing of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet’s What Is There To Say? [Columbia CS 8116] through the machine. This 1959 gem had been cleaned first in my trusty Spin Clean Mk II and then put through a cycle with my Nitty Gritty Mini-Pro 1 reference, using Audio Intelligent Vinyl Solutions Premium One-Step Formula No.6 cleaning fluid. After a 7:45 medium cycle of degassed, distilled water in the Degritter, the LP sounded anew. Mulligan’s baritone sax jumped out of my speakers with a startling presence. I also noted an increased sense of dimension due to a decidedly lower noise floor. Clearly, some substance or material embedded between the grooves had escaped the previous two cleaning systems. I experienced the same “unveiling” of sonic cues and greater definition when I ran my 1970 pressing of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush [Reprise RS 6383] through the Degritter. I’ll have no way of knowing whether an additional Nitty Gritty cleaning or the use of Audio Intelligent’s additional cleaning solutions might have been able to remove whatever was keeping my Koetsu from extracting more Mulligan and Young from those vinyl canyons. Once a record has been cleaned by one device, it’s not the same record when it goes into a second or third machine. If you visit the Degritter website, you can see high-definition photographs of discs before and after they were cleaned with the device. These photographs are a good visual representation of the sonic differences I’m attempting to describe: less noise of all forms and more music. One thing is certain: the Degritter achieves what it does more quietly and effortlessly than any previous system I’ve used.

Another lesson learned during my evaluation was that the older a record was, the more improvement I was likely to hear after a Degritter treatment. For example, dropping my Koetsu Black Goldline on an original pressing of Steely Dan’s Gaucho [MCA-6102] yielded even more layers of micro-detail than I was able to hear after a single Nitty Gritty Mini-Pro 1 cleaning. There was a tad more sparkle to keyboards, and I could more easily distinguish male and female voices in the background choruses. But after dialing back another dozen years to 1968, I could hear more texture in Charley Pride’s voice on his wonderful Make Mine Country [RCA LSP-3852] after a run through the Degritter. In fact, the perceived volume had increased so much that I found myself moving the potentiometer of my Convergent Audio Technologies SL1 preamplifier back a notch.

It’s impossible to discuss ultrasonic cleaning machines and not mention the elephant in the room -- price. At $3000, the Degritter is not for the vinyl dilettante. A person can buy a whole trunk full of great albums for that kind of coin. But for anyone who already owns a sizable record collection and has made a considerable investment in playback gear, the Degritter offers a lot of bang for the buck -- improved sonics, reduced wear and tear on records and phono cartridges, set-it-and-forget-it operation, and a wide range of programmable cleaning options. I fell in love with the ease of merely inserting a record, pressing a button and then enjoying the quietest and most natural-sounding vinyl playback I’ve ever experienced. What’s a fair price tag for that? My hope is that Degritter will have success and eventually release a more affordable unit with fewer bells and whistles so that even more vinyl lovers will have access to the benefits of ultrasonic cleaning.

ased upon my experience using the Degritter on a daily basis for several months, I can say that this is a dependable and extremely convenient cleaning system that works exactly as advertised. Its ability to banish noise and thereby unearth greater dynamics and emotionally compelling details from my favorite recordings provided pleasures I can’t do without. So, I bought the review unit and can honestly say that I am now one of those weirdoes who looks forward to cleaning records.