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SC-001 Development Story and video now available

We have published a written account of how the SC-001 Sonic Cleaning Brush was developed, along with a video showing the measurements behind it. The SC-001 ships from August 2026.

For a long time, cleaning a record meant choosing between two things: a simple brush costing a few dollars, or an expensive ultrasonic cleaning machine. Nothing in between was both easy enough for daily use and genuinely effective. The SC-001 came out of that gap.

The first thing we worked on was not the brush, but a way to measure its performance. Fine dust on a record surface is barely visible to the eye, and what cannot be seen cannot be counted or compared. We suppressed the reflected light with a polarizing filter, brought the dust alone into view, and calculated it as area through image analysis. Only once that method was in place could we begin selecting the bristle material.

This may come as a surprise: changing the bristle material alone changes the dust removal rate dramatically. Materials that feel almost identical in the hand ranged from removing only twenty-odd percent to removing more than eighty. The size of that gap surprised us more than anyone.

 

Video

Approx. 1 min 30 sec

The video shows the measurements as they were carried out — the moment the dust rises into view under the polarizing filter, and the surface potential falling as the brush is applied.

 

Development Story

PDF, 6 pages

The written edition covers what the video could not: how we read the market, why we ended up building our own way to measure, and how we resolved the contradiction at the heart of static electricity. Available in English and Japanese, together with a multilingual edition in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.