Dearest Carlos, thank you very much for your positive comments!
You possibily set aside your stock of ibota as most of your records may be in excellent conditions. The more I chat with fellow collectors, the more I am persuaded that 78 records are genereally in much better conditions *everywhere* than in Italy. If a record plays fine with thorns, I think I would also advise to leave it as-is (although arguably an ibota treatment might improve distortion towards the last grooves, and also speed stability on loud passages).
But as most records in Italy are found in the conditions shown in the videoclips, I was necessarily interested in experimenting to what extent ibota can help, and much to my susprise I've found that it helps greatly. For such extreme cases however, as I think I also stated in the clips, several treatments with ibota may be necessary to do the trick. A final pass with a soft tone needle greatly helps in definitively "heal" the grooves. I really don't know why it is so, but records that still can't be played with thorns after many passes, all of a sudden get perfectly playable after a final pass with a steel needle.
Of course this process is overkilling when the thorn can just barely play up to end of the record: in those cases, a quick pass with ibota is sufficient.
I am quite persuaded that the surface "burning" is not only due to the original composition of the record, but also by the way in which it was stored and later found. Records with a dull, "soapy" surface seem to me prone to develop surface burns. My educated guess is that some kind of essudation forms over the surface of the record in some storage/humidity/temperature conditions. I'm looking forward to read experiences from fellows who own records that are known to most likely develop surface burns (and of course not of much interest for their collections), maybe one side can be treated and the other played "as is" in order to see what happens.
However, when I play a record I usually have to cast out the background consciousness that the record might be to some extent degraded by the passage of the needle. But with the records featured in these videoclips, I had the unusual feeling that the combined action of the ibota wax and the needle was actually *improving* their condition.
