Kevvwill, all I can say is that you have to try it to know. Its true that a tick or pop is part of the LP experience, but it is also true that electronics can ring at high frequencies due to stability issues in the design. This will exacerbate the tick or pop event to be both louder and longer in duration than the actual event on the LP surface.
I had this demonstrated in spades some years ago. A friend of mine bought a Mobile Fidelity UHQR pressing and he was quite excited to hear it. He brought it to my house to play (I think he paid $250 for this thing so he was concerned that it not be worn, and trusted my rig more than his own).
The LP played fine. But the next day he called me up- at his house it was loaded with ticks and pops! We had the same 'table, arm and cartridge. The difference was in our preamps. He was using a semiconductor based preamp that used active equalization in its feedback loop. My preamp was zero feedback with passive EQ. In addition, my preamp was vacuum tube, but on paper anyway had 2 more octaves of bandwidth compared to the solid state unit.
He brought his preamp over and we compared- sure enough, the solid state preamp had a presentation loaded with ticks and pops, while my preamp hardly had any. Since then I have seen this demonstrated over and over. And I can tell you that it has more to do with feedback (active EQ) than it does with tubes or transistors.
The bottom line is that the electronics make a difference in this area, IME as much or more than cleaning the LP.
I had this demonstrated in spades some years ago. A friend of mine bought a Mobile Fidelity UHQR pressing and he was quite excited to hear it. He brought it to my house to play (I think he paid $250 for this thing so he was concerned that it not be worn, and trusted my rig more than his own).
The LP played fine. But the next day he called me up- at his house it was loaded with ticks and pops! We had the same 'table, arm and cartridge. The difference was in our preamps. He was using a semiconductor based preamp that used active equalization in its feedback loop. My preamp was zero feedback with passive EQ. In addition, my preamp was vacuum tube, but on paper anyway had 2 more octaves of bandwidth compared to the solid state unit.
He brought his preamp over and we compared- sure enough, the solid state preamp had a presentation loaded with ticks and pops, while my preamp hardly had any. Since then I have seen this demonstrated over and over. And I can tell you that it has more to do with feedback (active EQ) than it does with tubes or transistors.
The bottom line is that the electronics make a difference in this area, IME as much or more than cleaning the LP.