battling the pops and clicks

I am a born again vinyl guy ...I mean really new like days, but the little clicks and pops are for me kinda like watching fox news, the scroll is at the bottom but I dont pay attention to it, or when you watch a letter box movie, you see the bars at first then you forget about them once you get pulled in.....perhaps you are not getting lost in the music?

Anyone who can tune out clicks ans pops is either blessed or lying!

As a newbie getting into vinyl (just picked up a Rega P5 and a Dyna 20XH), I think that all the posting on this site and AA are very misleading regarding how "dead-quiet" everyone's vinyl is after using their RCMs (I also have a VPI 16.5) and special cleaning sauce.

Many posters set up the expectation for us newbies that all vinyl can sound as quiet as a CD, if only we spent enough $ on a rig and time cleaning. Maybe these posters have achieved great results buying brand new 200 gram vinyl sourced from recently discovered WW2 caves beneath Japan, stored and played in a semiconductor manufacturer's clean room, with a stylus cut from the Hope Diamond, ....

I buy and play alot of used vinyl. This stuff will never be dead quiet and I accept that. Let's be real. We're taking a plastic disc, jamming the hardest substance in the universe through a groove as wide as a hair, and not expecting environmental "contaminants" like dust, dirt, sweat, clothing fibers, etc. not to build up or in the case of used vinyl all those scuffs and surface scratches not to be audible? I doubt it.

I prefer the sound of vinyl to CD. But let's call it like it is and live with the fact vinyl and CD/digital have inherent advantages and disadvantages.

Every minute I spend cleaning records with that loud as hell vacuum is one less minute I have to listen music.

And that is the real tradeoff.

Dsockel makes a very valid point about cleaning records with the exception of the quiet operation of Loricraft machines. Also, newbies often have their price point set too low to enjoy a quieter presentation. Anyone that doesn't believe vinyl playback can be extremely quiet hasn't listened to a quality linear tracking tonearm hung with a great cartridge. I tire of explaining this so let me move on to the more common pivot arms. Many turntables, arms, cartridges (previous items amplify through mechancical shortcomings) and even phono stages actually magnify these noises electronically based on my experience. With a properly adjusted VTA the surface noise associated with generic vinyl seems outside the room and in my case isn't as loud as my homes ambient noise level. I've spent over 40 years collecting vinyl during which time I've always had a turntable where the tonearm and cartridges are bought separately. I've been able to replace defective software with better ones so I rarely am playing a record with scratches. I sometimes scratch my head when reading replies to this kind of question. Man, Raul has more stuff than you can shake a stick at. I'm surprised that he is accepting of anything more than a very occassional click or pop of reduced volume. Of course, among his many cartridges he doesn't own one by my manufacturer of choice which is the quietest in the groove I've ever heard as well as the most pleasing presentation I've yet to experience except moving up the food chain in the ZYX lineup, and he states that he doesn't like them too! Then again Raul doesn't like tubes. I'm sure however that because there is more than one way to skin a cat his system sounds marvelous and I'm not offering any criticism against him. We make our choices for ourselves and not others. I guess that if my music room were soundproof I would actually hear more noise since certainly with a pivot arm it will not be as dead quiet as CD's. In the real world of heating, air conditioning, cooking and other people living with you not to mention traffic, lawn mowing from neighbors and such there is little and infrequent noise differences between CD's and my analog front end, lead in and out grooves excepting. Synergy with every aspect of the analog front end cannot be over emphasized at all. Stand, table, arm, cartridge, mat, clamp, cables, lighting, dediciated lines, phono stage and cleaning of records and cartridge must work in harmony. I've always advised newbies to spend around $2500 used for long term happiness and have been raked over the coals for doing so. I still stand behind this as the sweet spot for price/preformance.

I have once wondered that if we were to introduce "snaps, crackles and pops" to a CD would we prefer the "bettersounding" CD to a pristine CD? Oh, and also add the interchannel phase error prevelant on vinyl that is so attractive to vinylphiles, making it sound "so much more real".
I love my vinyl music, but I do not think that, except for some extremely well done recordings, vinyl is superior to digital - certainly not from a noise point of view.

Bob P.