We create custom made surfactants for deep groove cleaning. Each of the surfactants releases different areas of the sound waves you hear or the very air it surrounds!

WHAT IS  A SURFACTANT?

Vinyl records are made from about 6 different forms of P.V.C (polyvinylchloride) which is a flexible water proof plastic. A surfactant cleans away debris left in the groove by softening the plastic to gently lift it away from the record groove.  

After an album gets recorded and mixed to the artist and producer’s satisfaction, the final mixes go to a mastering engineer, who gives everything a final sonic polishing in terms of both frequency and dynamics, as well as making sure that both the levels and tonality are consistent from song to song.  Once the mastering engineer is satisfied that they’ve gotten all the songs sounding as good as possible, it’s time to create the master disc. This is also known as a lacquer master, since it’s an aluminum plate covered in a thick coat of lacquer. Some mastering engineers do this themselves; others hand the project off to a specialized “cutting” engineer. 

In this step, the audio is routed into a cutting lathe — a large, specialized machine fitted with a cutting head that contains a tiny stylus usually made of sapphire. Whereas a turntable converts grooves on a record into sound, the electronics in the cutting lathe do the reverse: They turn the sound waves in the music into vibrations that the lathe’s stylus cuts into grooves on the master disc. 

The next step is the making of a “stamper” disc — something that takes place at the record manufacturing plant. First, the master disc is carefully washed — it’s critical to keep dust off it — and then sprayed with silver. Next, it gets submerged in a nickel bath and electroplated. The electroplating causes the nickel to fill the grooves on the disc.

The electroplated master then gets pulled apart, creating two discs that are mirror images of each other. One is the original lacquer master with grooves; the other is its opposite, with ridges instead of grooves. The latter is called the “father” disc and it’s what gets used as a stamper for pressing the record.

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT you finally have a delicate vinyl record, with 100s of grooves the width of a hair, where your music is picked up by your diamond tipped stylus, Even with the greatest care  over time contaminants like dust and hair sit in the grooves of your record, When this happens the stylus can’t bounce and pick up all the sound waves, meaning you don’t get the pure analogue recording!