Crackle and hiss on some albums

https://www.discogs.com/group/thread/671397
Clean them before first play with an ultrasonic cleaner and a release agent. Once the stylus "welds" them into the grooves it is too late.

Buy a SweetVinyl Sugar Cube or live with it like the old days.

How are you checking for dust? Visual inspection is futile unless the LP really is filthy. If you’re buying used LPs it may be that some are worn out; badly worn LPs can look perfectly ok by visual inspection. But if there’s simply gunk in the grooves, where the music is encoded and the gunk is not visible to the naked eye, then a Record Cleaning Machine would be of some benefit, but I’d recommend a conventional VPI vacuum type. Ultrasonic cleaning is a hobby unto itself.

A record can never be too clean.

So with your cheap turntable you did not hear lots of noise?

First, typically the noise goes down the better the turntable with a big drop when you hit high end… let’s arbitrarily say around $5K depending on the type of table. But then, you say that some are very quiet… so it doesn’t seem to be the table quality. Although many of my very noisy records became silent with a high end table and high end cartrige. I believe the cartrige has a much smaller stylist and it drops down much deeper into the groove from where damage had been done. I have a surprising number of beat up albums from the 1970’s that sound great.

Then there are albums themselves. There is a category of non cleanable albums that sound like you say. For me they have been less than 1 in a hundred when buying used records. But I have lots of experience. 99% of the time you can tell a trashed album at the store by taking it out and reflecting the lights from above across the album. A clean / non-destroyed album’s grooved area will be bright and shiny. Really high volume (in the music) area will show exaggerate grooves… so not quite as shiny… but overall bright and shiny. Trashed albums will be dull looking.

So, if you have a little noise, or constant surface noise a better turntable may take care of them. But if a constant noisy albums with pops and hiss. Even a good record cleaner ( a must if you will be collection… VPI sells an expensive if noisy vacuum cleaner) will not fix these. You need to figure out how not to buy them.

Dust doesn’t make pops. Good luck getting rid of them short of editing them out digitally or serious electronic mitigation costing more than all of your analogue equipment together.

View the pop/grooves with a microscope and you’ll see what you’re up against.

Cleaning after you’ve created them misses the boat.