surface noise reduction

Yet I might invest in a better cart one of these days.

@boxcarman If you are listening carefully and without bias, I think you'll find that the ability of the arm to track the cartridge correctly is far more important than what cartridge you have.

Of course to do that the cartridge must be compatible with the arm; it must be a proper weight and have compliance such that the cartridge mounted in the arm will create a mechanical resonance between 7 and 12Hz.

So you can't just get any cartridge that might be more expensive; if a cheaper cartridge is more compatible with your arm it will sound better (as long as you've also paid attention to proper loading if the cartridge is MM and high output).

@boxcarman You have two really important issues to address that were both brought up by @lewm early in this thread. The first is cartridge loading; cartridges like yours really need a proper load to sound right!

If unloaded, the inductance of the cartridge in parallel with the capacitance of your tonearm cable sets up a resonance that can be just barely ultrasonic or inside the upper end of the audio band, as you seem to have going on right now. This emphasizes ticks and pops.

Inexpensive (and some expensive) phono sections can make ticks and pops when the resonance I just mentioned overloads the input of the phono section. They can sound for all the world as if they are on the LP. Loading can help this as the resonance can be as much as 100x more powerful than the signal (so as much as 1/2Volt!) so the phono section needs very good high frequency overload margin, and many simple just don't have that because the designer didn't take this issue into account.

At any rate, get the loading sorted out. Here's a cartridge loading calculator; most of the time you can assume the tonearm cable to be about 100pf.