How do you get past the pops and hiss of LPs?

i politly disagree, i believe noise can eliminated. i rarely hear noise on lp's. many are used and i might hear a few pops or ticks on 1 out over every 5 or 6 lp's i play. the proper turnatable, arm and cartidge, and thorough set-up can get you there. even if you are using a lesser set-up now, look forward to the day you can hear the amazing quality of music that only an lp can offer.

Switch from classical to rock to drown out the sound of the hardware.

You can pretend you are listening with a big roaring fire in the listening room.

Charlie

If the records are permanently damaged, no cleaning will bring them back to life. If the records are properly cleaned and your vynil rig / phono section is of good quality and properly set-up, surface noise is not a problem at all. A decent linear tracking table, even a mass produced direct drive model, will make this fact oh-so clear to you. Pivoted arms are harder to work with in terms of cartridge geometry and more likely to be misaligned, doing further damage to the record with each playing. Sean
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I beleive Sean has nailed this one, no amount of cleaning or snake oil can ever restore a damaged LP. Sometimes when I read the posts I beleive some people dont want to hear the truth, the truth is anolog takes a lot of effort and time to get it right. But if done right it can be truly heaven. I noticed in the post your father said it allways sounded that way, it sounded that way for me also until I began to take it seriously. I beleive a a good example would be if you take a Yugo to the racetrack,it will go around the track but you may be last. You need good equipment to WORK IN CONCERT with each other. If all are done right, incudeing the LP`s condition all a person can say is WHOW. David