@stuartk, You wrote {You hear noise. Others of us don’t.
Perhaps it has something to do with differences in individual physiological structures and/or auditory
processing capacities?}
All sensory data is filtered through the brain. In sound, the filtering process is
known as “psychoacoustics”. This process allows a participant in a conversation taking place in a noisy environment—ie: a busy restaurant—to filter everything but their own conversation out of their perceptions. The same is true of our perceptions of the audible clicks and pops that SOMETIMES plague vinyl recordings.
The vast majority of clicks and pops are caused by tiny airborne foreign particles that can settle into record grooves during their exposure to contaminated air. Part of an effective vinyl playback ritual is compulsive attention to the cleanliness of your record collection. Good record hygiene also extends the service lives of both record collections and phono styli.
I use a $499 Pro-Ject discwashing/wet vacuum system; and my vinyl collection is virtually free of audible clicks and pops during playback.
Some serious audiophiles find this ritual is not worth their time. But for me, the improvement in soundstage imagery and the intensity of my emotional responses to music played back from vinyl is more than worth the temporal and monetary costs of admission to the transcendent world of analogue.
Here’s to great music, regardless of your choice of playback technologies!