What do you think causes the crackle and clicks we hear?

All I do is dust my LPs So that my stylus doesn't wind up making distortion near the end of the LP side due to dust build-up. I never wash the records, don't do anything about static or 'magnetic' fields. I just play the records and most of them are ticks and pops free. The age of them is irrelevant. Your system will not have a great deal of ticks and pops if its set up right.

These clicks, etc. are caused by a good stylus that tracks the imperfections, or a bad one that does not .

This statement is false.


I’m very used to not hearing any ticks or pops over an entire LP side, even on LPs that were pressed in the early 1960s that I bought used.

The cartridge makes no difference- this is consistent whether a Grado, Mico Benz, Lyra, Koetsu and so on.

When an album is mastered, its common to send a test of the stampers to the producer, who has to sign off on it. One thing he listens for is ticks and pops- it won’t do to have them pressed into the LP surface else there will be returns. This has been the process for decades, so production LPs should be pretty quiet. And if your phono section is well-behaved, they are.

I think pops are easier to understand but clicks and crackle noises, what causes this?

Some of course are caused by damage to the LP surface and static electricity. But not all. Many ticks and pops are caused by radio frequency overload of the phono section. The RFI is caused by the operation of the cartridge, which has inductance, interacting with the capacitance of the tonearm interconnect cable.


Many phono sections simply are not designed to deal with the RFI generated in this manner! So they overload and you get a lot of ticks and pops. When I say 'many' I mean most.