Being a record collector isn’t easy. You need to invest in good equipment, spend a fair amount on vinyl pressings, and buy a bunch of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise need if you instead played songs on Spotify like everyone else. You know, stuff like the Keith Monks Prodigy, a record-cleaning machine designed for consumer use.
We know, you clean your records with soap and water and it works well enough. Maybe, you even use a carbon fiber brush or wipe it down with a mild specialty solution. If you’re serious about bringing your beloved records to near-pristine conditions, though, this thing should bring commercial-quality deep cleaning the way professionals do it right from the comfort of your home.
The Keith Monks Prodigy is a universal record cleaner that can clean all kinds of vinyl pressings, whether it be 12-inch LPs, long-discontinued 10-inchers, and even seven-inch singles. It, basically, looks like a wooden record player, with a platter for mounting a record on a spindle and an arm with a cleaning head, albeit with a bottle of cleaning solution docked on one end to give away its specialized function. To use, simply put a record on the platter and power it up to get the thing spinning. Then, start pouring drops of cleaning solution (that bottle at the end) on the inner half of the record (it will spread to the outer section because of the spinning motion) and use a microfiber cloth to absorb any excess liquid outside the grooves. The outfit suggests you keep adding solution until the surface of the record is glossy.
From there, you move the arm, so that its head is directly over the innermost groove. That head is a vacuum, by the way, which will draw in the solution with all dirt and grime along with it while it hovers just a hair above the grooves. The arm will move from the inner grooves to the outer grooves all on its own, cleaning up your collection one record at a time. According to the outfit, you should be able to clean both sides of a standard 12-inch LP using this in about five minutes.
The Keith Monks Prodigy is made nearly entirely from bamboo, which is a noise-absorbing and low-resonance material, allowing it to operating in near-silence, so it won’t disturb anyone in your home. It’s also hard-wearing and moisture-resistant, so you don’t have to worry about fiddling with cleaning solutions while you’re around the machine. All dirt and grime suctioned off are stored in the removable central compartment, so you can simply take that off for dumping the contents after you’ve gone through all the records that you need to clean off.
As you can tell, this is far from an automated cleaning system, as you’ll need to manually spritz the cleaning solution and even absorb excess fluid on the surface using a microfiber cloth (unless you’re fine with the darn things splattering all over your house). Then again, you’re a record collector in 2020, so you can probably appreciate the attention that goes into the darn thing.
The Keith Monks Prodigy is available now, priced at $995.