The care and feeding of DJ equipment

United States
December 10, 2006 2:02am CST
One of the most important parts of being a good DJ is knowing how to take care of your records and your equipment. If your turntables, headphones and styli aren't clean and properly maintained, you will miss out on many opportunities to play gigs and you will also find it harder to stay in practice. More importantly, if you don't take care of your records, two things will happen: you will be embarrassed when one of them skips during a performance, and eventually you will have to try and replace something extremely rare. Experts and professionals have many different theories and personal preferences as to how to take care of these items... How do you maintain your turntables? Your styli? Your headphones? Your records?
1 response
jeffaim
@jeffaim (215)
• United States
15 Dec 06
Two things that I was surprised to learn about in taking care of records: 1) Spacers are important! Vital even! Records should not be on long shelves unless there are supportive spacers built into these shelves. Better off in crates than in a long unspaced row where they may be leaning on each other for support, potentially warping each other. 2) Don't leave the cellophane on the jacket! While this will protect the album cover, having the cellophane on 3 of the 4 sides will exert pressure on those sides and potentially warp the record.
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