tt surface noise reduce or tolerate?

Tvad, reason and what has remained of school physics demand that I agree with you. Often enough surface noise is masked by the music, no doubt about that. But with some LPs, even in silent passages, there is just no surface noise and I swear that my ears are still good. Of course this is not true of all Lps, but there seems to be vinyl which is practically without noise, if everything else is done right. Wished I knew why this is so.

Dan, I listen to a lot of tapes, old prerecorded ones and the new ones from the Tape Project. Also here, no tape is like the other. Some hiss terribly, others don't at all, however even the avarage LP runs much quieter than the average tape, at least with my rig.

Tvad, I've found this especially true with SACD, mostly of course with those made from old RCA or CBS three channel master tapes. Oddly enough, if comparing this to the the original LPs drawn from the same sources, you hear no such thing, possibly because it is masked by surface noise, when playing the LP. But some of those old Shaded Dogs can be very quiet, have good highs and plenty of bloom there and no hiss at all. So this is puzzling and perhaps food for another thread, because now I am really of topic. My apologies to Radiohead.

Tvad, you make good sense. This could well be so. Whatever, lets enjoy he music, noise or no noise, digital and analog...

Plato, Atmasphere and Stringreen are right. If you do things properly, which needs experience and patience and quite a bit of dough alas, vinyl reproduction can be so quiet that Tvad would be quite surprised. Perfect setup, a well designed TT and properly cleaned LPs are essential. The importance of a quality phono preamp is often underestimated. I run a Benz and a Souchy, have highly sensitive plasma speakers next to my stators and am never bothered by hiss and it is exactly as Stingreen points out, if there is an occasional scratch on the lp, it is heard on another plane apart from the music and as Atmasphere so rightly says, often my friends think I'm playing digital and are wondering why suddenly the music has so much bloom.
By the way, I do not wish to enter or fuel the digital-analog debate here. With certain kinds of music, I find digital preferable to vinyl, but only if treated with the same care to detail and not as plug and play.

Hear-hear, as the Brits say.....(: