Righto.
So my Degritter arrived yesterday. Very well and thoughtfully packed. Came with some "gifts" as it were - as other owners will find. That was a nice touch.
Looks nice, just like the pictures. Seems solid enough. I really like the aesthetics. I had one "uh-oh" moment. The slot where the records sit has a rubber lining. Something must have shifted in transport because one half of the rubber lining seemed loose, so the rubber slot narrowed precipitously towards one side. It would rub against records during cleaning if it stayed that way. I thought the rubber was held on by adhesive and that the adhesive must have come loose for one half of the rubber. On emailing Taniel, who got back to me quickly, it turns out the rubber is not adhered to the rim of the record slot, but affixes itself by ridges along the sides near both ends of the slot. The rubber is made to be easily taken off if the user wants to wash the US tank. Once I lifted the rubber up more to see how it went on to the rim, I was able to affix it back on and it seems to be staying. So...good to go. (I thought I'd mention this in case any owner experiences the same shifting of that rubber lining).
I filled the tank and used a couple ml of the cleaning fluid to try washing my first record. (I have not had time to actually listen to the results btw, I was just getting the machine up and running, checking everything worked). I chose the "Medium" setting, which is supposed to be 3 minutes wash, 2 minutes drying time.
All the cycles, including the ultrasonic washing cycle, are quite quiet and not remotely annoying, which was really nice to experience!
The fan when drying, which was set at it's default halfway power point of "10" was fairly loud. Not as loud as some other RCs I've heard - e.g. VPI and others. But loud enough to be pretty intrusive if one was trying to place this where other people might be hanging out. It's therefore really good that Degritter offers the option of changing the fan power to lower the volume. In playing with the fan settings, the volume/power of the fan can be raised considerably, and lowered a lot too.
Speaking of the fan settings, a feature I'd like to see is an automatic compensation for extending the drying time. In other words, if I have found that a drying time of 2:30 gets records dry, if I lower the fan setting the drying time will need to be extended. At this time, as far as I can tell, if you lower the fan power it's up to the user to experiment and find out what new drying time is appropriate with the new lower fan power setting.
I'd think that some sort of calculation would be possible, whereby the brain of the machine calculates how much longer drying time is needed for the record to be dried, and sets it accordingly. Even better would be to see such a calculation happening on the dry-time adjustment screen.
Anyway, I'm sure once the user has done his experimentation, some fairly permanent combination settings will be decided upon.
I used a record that I remembered to be quite noisy when I got it. It has lots of visual scratches, scuff and maybe "crud" on the vinyl.
The Medium cycle did it's thing, but the record came out still quite wet. It turned out that for some reason the default dry time for all the cycles had been set to 1 minute, which isn't enough to dry a record. I don't know why that default dry time was chosen on my machine, and the user manual pictures shows a default drying time of 2 minutes which makes more sense. So I dried it again. And fortunately the Degritter is very easy to dial in, so I simply chose a longer drying time, which automatically applied to all the washing settings. I expect no more issues with wet records. The flexibility and user friendliness of the Degritter is great.
The record came out looking obviously cleaner, though with quite a bit of the surface marks still there. I washed it again and it at least *seemed* to me the record looked even cleaner, though still with a number of surface marks left on. I therefore presume that what is left on the surface is actual record damage - e.g. scuff marks - rather than some sort of crap the Degritter did not remove.
So that's it after just receiving the machine and with one record used to test how it works.
Once I learn my way around this thing, it promises to be what I hoped for.
Once I start comparing the sonics of before/after cleaning, I'll report on that.