Bad vinyl

Clicks and pops? They are going to be found, the issue is how many? If you can't live with any, you are headed for constant frustration. Surface noise?   My brain learned how to filter it out listening to 78s a long time ago. Records are an imperfect medium learn to be flexible or find another medium.

Bill, those of us who have grown up with vinyl (formerly known as records or LP's), know about the possible issues with the medium.
There have been many threads like this one regarding new vinyl production vs. the golden days of manufacturing.

Since the old pressing plants were closed down and equipment was sold for scrap or put in storage, there are growing pains with these new start-ups. The original production crews were real craftsman; there is now a new generation of record cutters and techs.
Not to mention the current demand for vinyl has pushed the new mass-market pressing plants to their limit, where shortcuts in production, e.g.; the drying stage, and compromised quality control now exist.

When buying vinyl from the 60's, 70's and 80's, I have experienced very few returns due to defects as compared to today. And I don't mind hearing some tape hiss or surface noise from these records; it's easy to block it out when enjoying a good analogue recording. 

Actually I want to be able to hear the tape hiss on vinyl. If I can't I know something's wrong somewhere. Which is one of my objections to CDs. You often can't hear the original tape hiss. It should be there. Hel-loo!

@geoffkait , I agree that if NR and EQ are heavily applied to eliminate tape hiss, the recording suffers. 
Some listeners who grew up in the digital world expect all music to have a black background.

There is a definite difference in our perception for whatever reason. What you refer to as the golden days, I remember as the bad old days. I am 69 years old and started listening to my grandmother’s extensive jazz record collection of 78s when I needed to stand on a stool to reach the crank handle to wind up her Victrola. Seriously. I still have records I bought in in the mid 1950s with money earned from mowing lawns and from my paper route. In general the records made today are better, higher quality, quieter, flatter, thicker, and sound better overall than was the norm back in the day. With that said, I still buy a lot of old records and in general the survivors sound pretty good too. Part of this is that my hearing is not picking up as well as it once did of course. But then, too, in spite of deterioration due to age, I know how to listen better than ever. Another factor is that back in the hey day of vinyl a lot of regrind was added back into the vat and remelted to get as great a yield as possible out of the PVC pellets. This reached a crisis during the oil embargo in the early 1970s, (thank you Mr. Kissinger!). A lot of records were returned too because they were just not listenable, and of course these are not remembered now and people like you wax nostalgic about the good ole days. Sheesh.

There is another factor we have in our favor now, which is that companies like VPI make record flattening systems and others make vacuum systems to help hold the records flat. There are some fantastic record cleaning machines out there too, that did not exist back in the hey day of vinyl either. For those that don’t know it, making records is a dirty business. Even new records benefit from a deep clean before they are played for the first time. Finally, there are chemical treatments like those from LAST that not only help to preserve our records, but make them quieter too. So while you are lamenting the passing of some bygone era that you wish for, you are missing the fact that the best it has ever been is right now.

Hi Bill. I'm not saying you're wrong but I've purchased vinyl lately (within the last 10 years) that is just dreadful. This includes a limited edition "Are You Experienced?" ($35?) that has an impassable bridge (between the groove sides) that renders the song useless. Also, a first King Crimson album that sounds like white noise was mixed into the music. In both cases, I waited too long to return. So now I'm preaching "play ASAP and listen for defects".
As for the "old days", I remember many purchases that had paper fragments, from album label punch-outs, that got into the hot pot. Guess we'll have to wait for Heaven for a perfect world...