Frankly, I never bothered to clean discs. Keeping them in an anti-static sleeve helps (by a few old bits of vinyl online or at the garage sales, toss the discs and put your TC vinyls in) and should normally be enough. I used one of those brushes eons ago, but big disappointment. I don’t know what you mean by felt pad, as in scouring pad to rub over it? In which case I’d say don’t be bothered.
If you run a vinyl 1 time, the needle will scoop up most of the dust. You’ll usually only gather significant amounts of dust if you don’t use your TC vinyl for a longer period of time. So, play them once, remove the lint from the stylus and you should be solid. Especially since you are not listening to music, but generating a tone that nobody gets to hear.
I don’t know about the english term, but here we had a term when you played a (regular) track too often, we’d say it was “played grey”. And the sound quality would go from being worn. TC vinyls get used an extreme amount of times compared to regular vinyl tracks (which you might play once a night, whereas the same TC disc is played ALL night) and thus wear out relatively quickly. Not sure what the norm is these days, but expect to toss out your old TCs and replace them with fresh ones with some regularity (again, hoping some of our DVS readers can tell you generally how many hours of gig you can get out of one vinyl). This is another reason that dust shouldn’t be a big problem since you are not keeping the discs for years on end.
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