- Micro Care Premier LP Cleaner

Premiér™ Vinyl Record Cleaner is a mild precision cleaner formulated to clean, preserve and protect precious audio recordings. New DuPont solvent technology -- just invented in 2000 --enables Premiér™ to easily out-perform any other old-style LP cleaning system on the market today. In fact, it’s as good or even better than the old Freon® solvent cleaners which everybody used thirty years ago.

The solvent at the heart of this extraordinary cleaner has three characteristics which make it the best vinyl cleaner on the market today.

First, the solvent has a very low surface tension and very low viscosity. This means that Premiér™ is much, much 'wetter' than water. Unlike water, Premiér™ won’t bead-up on the waxy surface of an LP but instead it will spread out, flowing into the grooves and dissolving light oils and fingerprints. (We know you never touch the surface of your LPs, but there’s just no telling some folks.)

Secondly, Premiér™ is very heavy -- nearly twice as heavy as water, and much heavier than dust or the little bits of mold release compounds left on the LP by the stamping machine. This enables Premiér™ to get under the contamination on the record and displace it -- it literally 'floats' the contamination away, just like a ship floats in the ocean.

But it gets even better. One little-known fact about LPs is that they accumulate static, just like that cheap shag carpeting your parents put in the family room when you were a kid. Remember the jolt of electricity you got when you walked across the room and touched a doorknob? Well, the same thing happens to LPs as you slide them in and out of their sleeves or even just walk across a room with one in your hand (although obviously at much lower voltages). At the microscopic scale of a record groove and a dust particle, that tiny voltage acts like a powerful magnet and locks the dust particles onto the surface of the record. But Premiér™ features a special additive which breaks those 'static' bonds, freeing the dust to float off the LP. This unleashes the 'like new' sound that’s trapped in your LPs -- getting rid of the static means you get rid of the dust, along with the snaps and pops and cracks which drive you nuts.

Does it work? You bet. A skeptical Tom Lyle wrote in The $ensible Sound that "The results are impressive… I was amazed how silent the vinyl was." More recently, in Stereophile Michael Fremer wrote "Most importantly, after that first play the stylus remained clean, with no residue or dirt stuck to it.' No dust, no noise, just pure sound"

Here’s a couple of other useful features about Premiér™: