New vinyl quality....

Right. And I have no idea why this works, but I've been using the Radio Shack Bulk Tape Eraser (a great big demagnetizer) on my records just before playing and it does make for a more detailed yet smoother more grain-free sound. Not huge but definitely noticeable. Does not last. Need to do it every time. Which makes me think its static not truly magnetic. Whatever. How something works matters a lot less to me than does it work. 

The Furutech gizmo looks like carbon fiber bristles hang down very near to but not touching the record. Carbon fiber is conductive. Is it grounded? I don't see any ground wire. Is the base purely for mass to balance the thing, or is there a battery or something inside? Looks pretty easy to DIY.

It’s not grounded. The base is purely a weight for balance and convenience. It’s overpriced considering you can buy the brush itself for quite cheap and mount it on your own arm. But I’m not sure if the cheap brush is actually the same (Thunderon) material or not. The ads say it is.

The brush needs to be mounted on a swinging arm while the record plays because the record picks up static very quickly as it spins. I’ve tested this and the static comes back in less than a minute if you remove the arm. It needs to be positioned precisely 1-2 mm above the vinyl surface to work correctly. Although it’s expensive, the SK-Filter set-up works and it’s quite sturdy. Now that I’ve got it, I wouldn’t want to be without it.

I recently bought a 45 rpm jazz album with pretty bad pops and clicks. I bought another copy and it also had pops and clicks but in different parts of the record, so the noise appears to be a problem at the press, not the master.

One of the early attractions of CDs was the absence of such noise. I do my best with keeping my vinyl clean and dust-free, and when I succeed the sound is better than CD. I hate noise embedded in the tracks. Pops and clicks make me want to fall back to CDs.

Re new vinyl - apart from the pressing quality control considerations, I find it fundamentally problematic that most new vinyl is pressed from digital masters. Even considering the expense, I much prefer to buy original pressings from the late '50s until the very early '70s. Early-to-mid '60s is my favourite era, when the art of mastering and pressing records was at its peak, and most of the recording  and mastering equipment in use was still tube based. 

Yes digital is a curse. Several times now I have had records that sounded pretty good but not great, only to discover each time they had been digitally remastered. One of the worst, the Nautilus Rumours remaster, which despite being half-speed mastered sounded worse, turns out it was digitally remastered.

For years I could never understand how Famous Blue Raincoat managed to sound so good despite being a digital recording. Then one day reading an interview with Warnes it comes out that they weren’t happy with the result and so made a few copies one of which was dubbed onto analog tape, and all four of them preferred the analog tape. So that’s what we hear when we play the "digital" recording.

jameswei thinks he hates the noise embedded in the tracks. Well, at least with vinyl you stand a fighting chance eliminating the noise. At least with analog the noise is noise you know is noise. With digital the noise truly is embedded in the signal. With digital the noise is the signal itself.

Don’t take my word for it. Listening one night my wife exclaimed how quiet the record is. I said yes I cleaned it really good. She said no. Had to ask her a few questions to get to the bottom of it. She was saying what I just said, that with CD the noise is the signal. The music is the noise. It just doesn’t hit you as obvious as a pop or a tick. Its more insidious than that. Worse than that. Its why the same records, turntables, arms and cartridges, and phono-stages that were made 50 years ago are still prized, yet they have to keep reinventing digital every few years.