Much of the disturbing quality in skips is totally hardware dependent. Let me explain why. A skip on a record is not like music. It has a very, very steep rise time and often has energy into the ultrasonic range. Many cartridges, unlike compact discs, can output significant energy to 50K and beyond. Some preamps and amps do not like trying to amplify high level ultrasonic signals with fast rise times and will become unstable or slew rate limit. Not good. Most, but not all, high end gear deals with this better than mid-fi stuff and reproduces ticks without the colorful palette of harmonic and enharmonic distortion products that lesser gear may produce. High end tonearms and cartridges tend to be better damped and store less energy as well; they tend to be less excited by the energy that the cartridge feeds back into the arm when excited by tics. Better platters tend to prevent the record itself from ringing. What I am saying is that, barring the purchase of a peaky old-school moving coil (and the Dyna is not), high end rigs really tend to minimise ticks and pops in a way that mid-fi gear cannot even approach. Finally, with correct VTA the tics and pops are produced in a perceived plane different than the music and not within the fabric of the music itself. The brains sensory gating is then better able to tune them out as well. In the end, don't worry. You're gonna love LP replay.
Marty
