AUDIO Topics: Record Care, Part I
by REQ WILLIAMSON

Unless you are especially fortunate, it is fair to say that most of us rely upon two main sources: FM radio is consistently by far the best source ac cessible to the audio buff. British listeners to the BBC are specially favored in that a good live broadcast from a major city is likely to be fed to the transmitters over a digital (PCM) link of superb fidelity; and they have lately also been broadcasting some ex perimental digital recordings. Most of these are extremely well balanced and put to shame the very finest commer cial source recordings, even digital or d-to-d.
Sadly, my experience suggests that my friends in the USA are in no way so fortunate, except perhaps in isolated cases (which I’d like to hear about). For the American enthusiast, reliance
-	upon commercial source recordings is virtually absolute; and I am not sur prised that the pacemakers in ‘‘super discs” have been the US record pro ducers, usually the smaller entrepre neurs. So, at last, we reach the theme of my piece for this issue: how to get
* the best out of these records—any re cords—when they are good, or were when they left the pressing plant!
The chastening fact is, the first and worst thing one can do with one of these records is take it out of its sleeve. No, I didn’t really mean that. I know full well some records should never be taken out of their sleeves—my son has dozens of them!) What I mean is this.
Records are made of plastic, as you know—actually, a copolymer of vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate which forms part of a list of materials we call a triobic series. If any two of these materials come into contact with one another and are then separated, the material higher in the list acquires an electrostatic charge of positive polarity and the one below it in the list gets a negative charge. Since the vinyl used for discs is near the bottom of the list, it follows that most sleeve materials are likely to give the records a charge merely as we remove it; and since most sleeves are made of either paper or another plastic higher in the list, the record ends up negatively charged almost every time. Some plastics are low in the triobic list than vinyl—PTFE is one; but a safe rule is, that the charge will be negative.
Actually, the polarity does not con-
cern us at this stage; its effect does. The charge level can be quite massive given a dry environment, reaching at the moment of removal from the sleeve many kilovolts of magnitude. Not lethal, of course—it is virtually cur rentless; but the effect is to attract within the immediate area of the disc’s two surfaces every floating particle of dust in the atmosphere, which will stick there with a tenacity that beats any known glue and defies all attempts at removal by any orthodox cleaning method, which invariably make the situation worse by “topping up” the charge. Handling the disc doesn’t help, either: human skin is fairly high in the triobic list. To compound your increasing despair, when you come to play the thing, the movement of the disc beneath the pickup can emulate a miniature Van de Graff generator:
minute discharges across the stylus tip result in some pretty unnerving cracks out of your speaker system that sound like lumps of granite in the grooves.
So when I say friends, that static electricity is the major inhibiting factor in getting the best reproduction out of your records, you will appreciate I do not do so without carefully considering all the factors involved.
This is all very well, you may say, but what can one do about it? Well, a number of proprietary remedies are on offer in the hifi marketplace: gadgets such as “guns” that generate ionized particles supposed to neutralize the charge. Unfortunately, their efficacy is sometimes questionable, especially when the device generates anions as well as the desirable cations. And in any case the effect can only be short since as soon as the record is handled again it starts to build up yet another charge.
For a long term, or permanent solu tion we have to turn to chemical means. Again, a number of excellent, usually very expensive proprietary preparations are on the market. They are based on a group of specialized chemicals called surfactants—a fancy name for what you and I call deter gents! However, they are as I said, a special group. Surfactants have a number of interesting properties, any one of which will, if we select careful ly, be valuable in our battle with static.
All are in varying degress water-
attracting, or hydrophilic, and at one and the same time water-repellant, or hydrophobic. The hydrophobic portion of the molecule may also carry a residual charge. If not, it is nonionic:
if it carries a negative charge, then it is anionic; and if the charge is positive, then it is described as being cationic. A number of other subtle properties will determine a particular surfactant’s suitability as an anti-static agent. Suf fice it to say that some degree of hydrophilicness is desirable, since a damp disc is more likely to dissipate a charge quickly; and a surfeit of positive ions to neutralize the disc’s negative charge is also desirable.
A number of specialized and highly effective cationic surfactants are available from most large chemical companies-. I will mention just two which are ideally suited for our record treatment: Cyastat SN, marketed by Cynamid Company, Bound Brook, NJ; and Armostat 900, marketed by Armour Hesse through the Armak Company, P0 Box 1805, Chicago, IL. One fact emerged from my experi ments, that even a minute amount ap plied to the surface of the disc is enough for a lifetime cure. Much of the literature suggests that about 0.5% solution is enough to apply an inert film about a molecule thick. The literature also suggests that the material ought ideally to be added to the plastic when the disc is made for 100 percent effectiveness. It is sad that so few record manufacturers have shown any interest in the durability and quality of their product, although some treated discs have been produced on a limited scale in Japan.
Anyway, another fact emerged. Since the constituents of these com mercially available antistatic solutions are so cheap, but the final product is far from being so, TAA readers might like to make up their own. All you need is the basic antistatic agent, and with any luck, Old Colony may be able to offer enough for more than your individual needs. A 5cc. phial will, in 0.5% solution, make up a liter of antistatic fluid, enough for a very large collection.
The solvent should be easily ob tainable, since it is a 1:1 mix of pro panol (or isopropyl alcohol) and pure water. I emphasize pure water, not water from the faucet since this con-

"Reprinted, with permission, from Audio Amateur, Issue 2, 1981, p.p. 19-20, 45 of Audio
Amateur magazine. © Copyright 1980 by Audio Amateur Corporation. P.O. Box 876,
Peterborough, NH 03458, USA. All rights reserved."