How do you get past the pops and hiss of LPs?

Sean is right on with his comments. The issue is not LPs it is more likely the LPs you have. I have LPs that are decades old and still sound very good. Many LPs that people played for years without any proper care are going to sound 'beat', because they have been abused. I refer to the damage done to the groove by dragging a dirty cartridge through them, not some terible form of violence. The problem is not the format, it is the miscare of the the medium.

Pops and hiss are not recorded onto the LP, and unless an LP has been abused it will be easy to clean. At which point it will be vastly superior to CDs and even SACDs.

How good would the average digital based system sound if the CDs were tossed around or abused??? At least the LPs will play. The CDs aren't even usable.

Any medium or product will last a long time, and sound good as long as it is well cared for by it's owner.

Actually hiss is recorded on vinyl, its tape hiss, which can be audible on (ironically) a quiet disc! Must be part of the "extra" information that is retrievable from vinyl. BTW, you won't hear tape hiss on a vinyl disc that was recorded digitally.

Salut, Bob P.

But you do hear tape hiss on a CD sourced from analog tape or one mixed on a noisy board.

I guess that I just listen to the music. If you want to make a big issue out of a few clicks, and destroy the musical experience for yourself, then that is your right. At least, on an LP, the music is there to begin with. Is the experience of listening to a live jazz club event destroyed because someone tinkled the ice cubes in their drink at the next table? Is a live performance of classical music wrecked because somebody coughed in the audience? If your LP has the sound of bacon frying on it, then clean it, or get a new LP. LP's never claimed "perfect sound forever". They just have the best sound obtainable, for as long as you take good care of it.

Folks who say to get CDs are partially right.
It's realy easy to built a nice sounding system arround CD-player where you can use pocket one with line-out connected to the Grado Headphone system and it will sound nice and this is where you can't do the same arround records.

Analogue playback setup needs EFFORT much more than money!
Records as well as CDs should be properly STORED and PLAYED thus will need almost no cleaning(well only sweeping before placing styli). As I remember using cartriges with replacable styli I was change it real often not to create further damage to vinyls. Tracking and alignment plays the vast role in this case as well.
Applying a large effort to clean already damaged records probably used as sleepers or stored with no inner sleeves in one carton jacket or any other kind of mis-use with bad styli, improper cueing can only bring little-to-no success.

Having to shop for the loved records either online or in local stores, checking condition and than taking proper care of the new "normal" collection, without even thinking or examining replacing an old cartrige or styli, also having possible replacement of an old tonearm aged throughout years for even any cheap new will eliminate the vast vast noise from your records.