We are Jochen Heibertshausen and Jost Butzko, two musicians who for ages have not only been concerned with making music but also with listening to music. Children of the digital age as we are we had a long way to go - back to the good old record. On the one hand we were thrilled by its sound, on the other hand we were always in doubt if musicians of this day and age can turn its back on the new technology. What tipped the scales in favour of the record for us was that its rendition of music coincides almost entirely with our idea of it. We owe it to two friends in particular – Stefan Gellrich and his shop “SG-Akustik“ in Karlsruhe (southern Germany) and Martina Schoener of Garrard (see links) – that we have turned into two veritable fetishists of analogue technology – despite all its inherent problems. Which brings us to our topic: The majority of records availabe today are used. Everybody has probably experienced this sinking feeling that comes when you have bought a perfect-looking record but your expensive hi-fi system only produces sounds resembling a bonfire rather than music. (Tolerance levels vary, naturally.) But it is then that you realize that ‘cleanliness‘ is an issue with records. For a long time, however, we had negative results with cleaning records– until we met Martina again (who had looked after Jochens hi-fi system years ago). She had been engaged in research on record cleaning for years and had built the loricraft system, achieving continuously excellent result. We want to enable others to profit from the expertise and that’s why we started recordcleaning.com. back to homepage