One brush set, and the person behind it
Tonebrush is a small shop with a single product: a three-piece record cleaning set built around a velvet block. That is the whole catalog, and it is deliberate.
Nick Talbot
Record care writer and test bench lead, Tonebrush
Nick has been buying records since the late nineties and keeps about 1,200 of them in an apartment that is louder than his neighbors would like. He runs the Tonebrush test bench, which is mostly a Technics SL-1200 and a lot of patience. Every guide, every product page and every line of this site carries his name, because a site that hides its writer is asking you to trust nobody in particular.
Why the catalog stops at one item
Most accessory shops carry forty products and know two of them well. We went the other way. One set means we can answer any question about it in a sentence, ship it from stock instead of a warehouse we have never seen, and write pages that go deep instead of wide. When somebody emails to ask whether the velvet block is safe on a 78, the answer does not have to be looked up.
It also keeps us honest about scope. A velvet brush handles dry surface dust, and it handles it well. It does not remove fingerprints, it does not lift mold out of a groove, and it will not rescue a record that spent a decade in a damp garage. Those jobs need a wet clean, and we say so on the record cleaning kit page rather than pretending one tool covers everything. Selling a second product would make that conversation harder, not easier.
The last reason is the boring one. A single SKU means a single stock line, which means the thing you order is on a shelf and moves within 1 to 2 business days. Nothing is drop-shipped from three suppliers with three different lead times.
How Tonebrush started
The short version: a record that sounded worse than it should have. Nick had been running a cheap carbon fiber brush for years, the kind with a strip of fibers that fans out when you press it. It moved dust around the surface and left a neat gray line at the edge of the label every single time. A friend handed him a velvet block from the seventies, the sort that came bundled with turntables back when everybody owned one, and the difference was immediate. Dust ended up in the pile instead of on the run-out groove.
Finding a decent modern one turned out to be harder than expected. Half the listings called velvet blocks "carbon fiber" in the title. The other half shipped a single small brush and hoped nobody read the fine print, which is exactly the complaint that shows up in the feedback we publish on the reviews page. So Tonebrush exists to do one small thing properly: sell the complete three-piece set, describe it in the words it deserves, and photograph what is actually in the box.
What this site will and will not tell you
We publish the dimensions we can measure, the materials the supplier documents, and the buyer feedback exactly as it was written. We do not publish dust removal percentages, fiber counts or lifespan figures, because no such numbers exist for this product and inventing them would be the easiest thing in the world.
The same rule applies to the reviews. The rating on this site is 4.6 out of 5 across 151 ratings, and the star distribution is printed with the low ratings visible. The thematic count we run on the written feedback appears on the reviews page with the two complaint themes included, because a page that only shows praise teaches you nothing about the product. Our full method is written out on the how we test page.
The guides
Everything Nick writes outside the product pages lives in one place. Start with how to clean vinyl records if you have just bought a turntable, move to the record care routine once the basics are automatic, and read how to store vinyl records before you buy any more shelving. The two technical pieces, carbon fiber versus velvet and cleaning a record player needle, exist because those are the two questions that arrive by email most often.
If a guide gets something wrong, tell us. Corrections are the cheapest quality control there is, and the fastest way to reach Nick is the contact page.
Where we are
Tonebrush is published by Animouf LLC, 30 N Gould St STE R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. Orders are taken through Stripe, shipping is free, and the countries we deliver to are listed one by one in our shipping policy. Every order carries a 30-day money-back guarantee with free returns.
If you want the product itself rather than the backstory, the 3-in-1 record cleaning brush set is on the homepage, the velvet block is explained on the anti-static record brush page, and the small black-bristled tool has its own page at stylus brush.