People I know who collect rare Blue Note jazz lps use a VPI record cleaner:
http://www.vpiindustries.com/hw17.htm

Here's a more than glowing review of said record cleaner:
http://www.vxm.com/21R.117.html

But since the price of said record cleaner is over $900! (ouch), here are instructions on making your own "just-as-good" version for $50
http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/cleaner/cleaner.html

Along with these instructions is a recipe for homemade record-cleaning solution, which I'll go ahead and reprint here:

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"The safe formula is the same as archival commercial preparations, except that you are mixing it yourself and therefore it costs you a fraction of the price of ready mixed. It can be used for both hand and vacuum cleaning. It is a 25 percent solution of isopropyl alcohol in water, with a drop of surfacant. Ethyl alcohol, sometimes applied to records in the form of vodka is more damaging to vinyl than is isopropyl. Use it only in an absolute pinch.

Drugstore isopropyl contains too many impurities to qualify it for record cleaning. Use technical or lab-grade isopropyl, which is extremely pure. Reagent grade is unnecessary and far more expensive. Water should be steam distilled, triple de-ionized. Both of these are readily available at a chemical supply house, which should sell them to you in pint and gallon sizes.

You also need to add a drop of surfacant, or wetting agent, to reduce the surface tension of the water so the formula can penetrate down into the grooves. Very high frequency grooves, in the range of 15 kHz, can be as small as four millionths of an inch, according to Wald Davies of LAST. Though alcohol itself helps somewhat, you still need a wetting agent. Two excellent and safe choices are Triton X-114 from Rohm-Haas and Monolan 2000 from Diamond Shamrock. Both of these are nontoxic - but don't take them internally - and biodegradable. Very importantly, they leave behind no residue on the record. They are harmless in these small amounts to record vinyl and, as far as is known, to any of the conceivable by-products and impurities likely to be found in record vinyl.

Kodak's Kodaflow is sometimes recommended as a wetting agent. Do not use this as it contains chemicals in addition to surfacants that would leave behind residues bad for both record and stylus. Kodak recommends against this application. "

I'm going to start aquiring the components at garage sales to make one of these record cleaners myself.

Sabu

[ Edited by: Sabu The Coconut Boy on 2004-09-09 16:55 ]