tt surface noise reduce or tolerate?

I have found several things are important to significantly reduce LP surface noise:

1) make the cartridge track. The tone arm, the cartridge, the setup, the platter pad and proper grounding all play vital roles.

2) a quality phono preamp with zero feedback. I have found that phono sections that employ feedback will also exacerbate ticks and pops. Tube preamps that employ feedback may be more noisy than transistor preamps, but they will make less ticks and pops. Tube preamps without loop feedback will make the least.

The items of number one are things that can cause the cartridge to momentarily mistrack if not attended to. Mistracking can be the difference between a record seeming to be somewhat worn, when it is not, or a record seeming to be noisy when in fact it is quiet, were it simply played back competently.

The item of number two if not attended to will be an added layer of crackle. This is due to the propagation delay present in the phono circuits, being exacerbated by the loop feedback. Small ticks and pops that may well have been masked will suddenly be displayed in relief.

Once these things are taken care of, and as long as the LPs are in good reasonable condition, ticks and pops will be far less prominent- you may find that your friends are assuming that you are playing CDs when its really an LP playing.

So far all the Radiohead LPs I've gotten have been quiet.

In the CD world, those with analog master tapes are frequently reissues of older LPs. Older master tapes have degraded with time; its not that the original LPs covered up the hiss, the hiss was often simply not there. If you get a chance to play with a 1/2" format stereo tape machines you find out what I really mean.

A lot of transistor tape machines will make a sort of 'modulation noise' that is absent on the tube tape machines, and it is transistor recorders that often are used to master CD reissues. So CDs will often have tape hiss that the original LP issues will not, though no fault of either media- its more of a mastering problem.

Crem1, what do you mean by 'Lps fail'? I've had LPs for 35 years now but I have yet to see one fail. OTOH I've seen a few CDs failing recently. For me, 'fail' means it won't play or degrades significantly **with proper storage**. LPs IME do not fail but CDs and most all tapes do.