Brand new vinyl may be noisy, even with a new stylus. It might need cleaning (yes, even if new) or it might be a bad pressing where even cleaning it thoroughly will not help. In that case it should be returned.
JJ, Are you saying that you have other older LPs that play perfectly routinely without ticks and pops? Because your problem seems typical for static electricity in your environment. What steps do you take to reduce static electric charge on your LPs just before playing?
"Flubbing" does sound like something other than static electricity problem. Look very carefully for things that may be touching each other that normally should not be touching. Best to get a knowledgeable friend to visit your home and take a look. These sorts of oddball problems are sometimes impossible to solve from afar. Is the cartridge bottoming out against the surface of the LP? In that case, yes, you need either a new cartridge or a new stylus assembly if your cartridge has replaceable stylus. But check your VTF else you will ruin even a new cartridge or stylus assembly, if VTF is too high.
@jjbeason14I think we need to know what 'flubbing' means in this case.
One thing that can cause ticks and pops is the input of the phono section overloading at ultrasonic frequencies. This is actually pretty common and is caused by the inductance of the cartridge being in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable- the two in parallel set up an electrical resonance.
In this case the resonance is likely barely above the audio band. It can be as much as 20dB so tracking noise can be boosted quite a lot above the audio signal so the phono section can overload.
Your old cartridge had the same inductance though. So this may not be the reason you're experiencing this. Do you make any other changes- different tonearm cable or the like?
Is the cartridge body touching the LP when you hear "flubbing"? Which is what I asked earlier. If yes, then yes there may be a problem with your new blue stylus. Its suspension may have collapsed. This could be because it was defective from new or because you have set VTF much too high or even because of a big error in setting VTA. But the first thing is to observe whether the cartridge body is intermittently touching the LP surface.
Needle seems to be picking up debris from somewhere. When I cleaned the stylus without the cleaning solution the vinyl sounds 95% better. Still some pops on Sketches in Spain, but other than that much better.
The question was not whether the stylus was intact but whether the body of the cartridge is contacting the surface of the LP. If you can see debris on the tip of the stylus (probably shouldn't call it a needle), then your LP is grossly dirty OR you've got a very dusty environment maybe augmented by static charge. But first, does the body of the cartridge contact the LP at any time in the course of play?
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