Hi,
As Randyman noted, the task of keeping vinyl clean was indeed never-ending. The tracking brush I eventually used was the Decca Record Brush, but there was a much earlier one, also from England, with a Cecil Watts brand name. I recall having that installed on my AR turntable in the early '60s, when I was in college.
Even the Decca was a mixed bag. The friction of the carbon-fibre bristles agains the vinyl increased the static charge (although it was supposed to dissipate the charge, but it didn't) until I installed a ground wire from the arm that held the tracking brush. That helped.
But among my friends and reviewers, the true badge of a serious vinyl collector was whether or not you owned the Nitty Gritty Record Cleaning Machine--I think VPI also make them--which applied a mix of distilled water and alcolhol, rotated the disc, and vacuumed up the residue. The two friends of mine who own record-cleaning machines, and swear by them, have, respectively, collections of 13,000 and about 10,000 vinyl albums, which include multiple international pressings of the same album.
I could never quite justify getting one. Now, I play vinyl so seldom that I wouldn't consider it. Still, they are neat machines.
Re the "wet playing": a marvelous host of a CBC national classical FM program ("Off the Record") in Canada, Bob Kerr, used to occasionally use wet playback on air for rare pressings from his own collection. It worked extremely well, but Randyman is right. The wet playback leeched out the chemical vinyl stabilizers, so the disc would become unlistenably noise except with wet playback.
Regards,
