There are a couple of ways to reduce or eliminate pops and tics. The first way is to clean the records as best possible. The second is to not play the part of the groove that has the pops and tics. (Yes, Ricky. There's some splainin' to do.)
The first way, cleaning, is well known and fairly easy to do. Since the OP has a good record cleaning machine, that's not particularly relevant in this thread.
The second way to reduce noise is more subtle and at least partially relies on a clean groove. It has to do with stylus size and profile. I cite the following as an example.
I was using an AT OC9/II for years. when one wore out, I replaced it with another identical cartridge, standard OC9/II stylus type. I pretty much knew where most every pop and tic was on all my favorite records.
I had an old Lyra Clavis Da Capo rebuilt by Soundsmith last year. The rebuilt uses a Boron cantilever with a very small line contact stylus that rode deeper in the groove. When it arrived from Soundsmith, it got mounted on an identical JMW-12 tonearm on a VPI Aries Extended (Original) table, the same as the OC9's. The pops and tics almost completely disappeared. The part of the groove where the new stylus contacted the vinyl had not (to my knowledge) every been touched by a stylus before. There remained some deep groove damage that remained audible, but the groove silence was quite nice.
The very small stylus takes a lot of the guesswork and concern away from buying used records. Most used records have never had a stylus contact the grooves where the very small Soundsmith stylus rides. I imagine there are some other cartridges with very small stylus. It might be worth looking into rather than spending $2,000 and putting another piece of electronics in the sensitive phono chain.
Just thought I'd share. YMMV.
The first way, cleaning, is well known and fairly easy to do. Since the OP has a good record cleaning machine, that's not particularly relevant in this thread.
The second way to reduce noise is more subtle and at least partially relies on a clean groove. It has to do with stylus size and profile. I cite the following as an example.
I was using an AT OC9/II for years. when one wore out, I replaced it with another identical cartridge, standard OC9/II stylus type. I pretty much knew where most every pop and tic was on all my favorite records.
I had an old Lyra Clavis Da Capo rebuilt by Soundsmith last year. The rebuilt uses a Boron cantilever with a very small line contact stylus that rode deeper in the groove. When it arrived from Soundsmith, it got mounted on an identical JMW-12 tonearm on a VPI Aries Extended (Original) table, the same as the OC9's. The pops and tics almost completely disappeared. The part of the groove where the new stylus contacted the vinyl had not (to my knowledge) every been touched by a stylus before. There remained some deep groove damage that remained audible, but the groove silence was quite nice.
The very small stylus takes a lot of the guesswork and concern away from buying used records. Most used records have never had a stylus contact the grooves where the very small Soundsmith stylus rides. I imagine there are some other cartridges with very small stylus. It might be worth looking into rather than spending $2,000 and putting another piece of electronics in the sensitive phono chain.
Just thought I'd share. YMMV.