atmasphere - Very interesting post. I can see how the phono pre circuitry could cause such an issue. I suppose a clear sign that this is happening is if the same passage exhibits clicks and pops at different times when played several times.
I don’t think I have an excessive tick & pop problem, as some LPs are extremely quiet through my McIntosh C220’s MM phono section (a tube/SS hybrid). But, I will try replaying passages with loud ticks to see if they repeat at the same spot or not. It’s just that I buy only used records in a wide range of conditions, so I don’t expect very quiet surfaces on many of my LP purchases.
Honestly, the Sugarcube-2 appeals to me every bit as much for the digitizing, track splitting, and meta-data retrieval features as it does for the click and pop filtering. Sadly, my beta unit will ship without those features. Sweetvinyl promises a firmware upgrade that will add these features eventually. There may even be an optional surface noise filter. We’ll see...