AudioQuest Conductive Fiber Record Brush

REVIEW
by Jonathan Valin
Aug 07, 2017

I’ve been using (the same) AudioQuest Record Brush since I lost my Decca record brush in a move many years ago. I imagine I’ll keep using it until my next big move, after which someone else will inherit it. These things last forever—certainly longer than I will—and do the job they’re intended to do. (Or so I thought—foolish me.) No, they don’t replace a record-cleaning machine, but let’s face it: Do you really use that Klaudio or Clearaudio or Record Doctor every time you put a given LP on the platter? I don’t. Oh, I give records a deep cleaning every half-dozen or so plays, but the rest of the time, like you, I brush them off with my AudioQuest.

Comes now a new and improved version of AudioQuest’s ubiquitous carbon-fiber wonder that answers the burning question: “Does the AudioQuest Record Brush provide a ‘good electrical path between the fibers and the handle?’” Apparently the answer is: “No,” according to AudioQuest’s Bill Low.

Enter AudioQuest’s Conductive Fiber Record Brush, which has “ideal conductivity from the Carbon Fibers, through the internal parts of the brush, to the conductive Gold Contacts placed right where your fingers need them.” The result: Static electricity (and the clicks and pops it can cause) is grounded at your hand, rather than being sent back into the vinyl through the brush. Additionally, the new AudioQuest uses “a far greater quantity of new smaller fibers in order to more effectively sweep away micro-dirt, not just the less relevant visible dust.”

Well, ok, maybe. I dunno. On first acquaintance, the only change I noted was that the brush feels different (lighter and a bit flimsier) than the original. But who cares? You’re going to buy one; I’m gonna buy one; anyone who listens to vinyl is gonna buy one. And if Bill Low says it’s improved, so much the better.

Not just highly recommended—the thing is indispensable.

AUDIOQUEST
(949) 585-0111
audioquest.com
Price: $19.95

Tags: AUDIOQUEST RECORD CLEANING VINYL

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.