Many vinyl aficionados are horrified that I use dish soap. They'll recommend some super-expensive formulation. The dish soap and a few seconds rubbing with your fingertips will take the grease, dog hair, mold, and other nasty stuff right off.
(I mean liquid dish detergent, meant for handwashing dishes. The powder stuff will scratch.)
You'll still need to pick the fuzz off of your needle now and then. I make a little brush for that by tearing the corner off a sheet of paper.
It's like that Special Magic VHS Head Cleaner Fluid. I sniffed it, and it smelled just like isopropyl alcohol. I've been refilling it with iso alky ever since, and it works great.
I use iso alky on a cotton ball to clean the scanner all the time, too.
It absolutely is IPA. The pro stuff is usually especially high-purity (99.8%+) but nothing all that special. The only special thing worth getting for tape heads, capstans, transports, and CD/DVD laser lenses is a lint-free swab with a more square head than a q-tip.
Dish soap is fine on vinyl records, but use distilled water. The "residue" is more likely to come from unfiltered tap water than soap. And let them air dry completely before re-sleeving them because they can and will grow moldy, especially if the records are put away wet with paper sleeves.
You don't need a fancy brush for cleaning the stylus, but a polyurethane gel pot is even easier to use (just dip the stylus tip in it), more thorough, and trivial to clean.
And a cartridge/stylus upgrade, which for this setup probably doesn't need to be anything more than an $80 Ortofon Red and could easily be less. AFAICT this Pioneer has a replaceable cartridge.
I think the cartridge on my turntable may have already been replaced, but I'm not sure. The previous owner said it was her ex's and that he'd serviced it when he owned it, and the current cartridge is a Grado, which I understand is a reputable brand? I've still obviously got a lot to learn about vinyl haha.
