Is it possible to have vinyl nearly noise free?

Use a Zero-Stat on the record just before play. Use Static-Guard https://www.walmart.com/ip/Static-Guard-Spray-5-5-Ounces/21092566
Puff a little around (not directly over) the turntable. Waft a little around the phono leads, phono stage, and over all interconnects and speaker cables. Between the conditions in my room and how keen I am on SQ I do this before every side. Its not like it gets real bad and I hear zapping if I don't do it as often. But if I skip a side or two and then spray there is a rather obvious improvement in terms of a little less grain and a lower noise floor. This stuff is cheap, I don't mind the smell, and I never ever hear or see any static zapping or popping anywhere when I do this.

The improvement spraying the cables tells me static isn't just a problem when records pop. Its everywhere. Cable Elevators get them up off the floor and work great. Same for power cords and interconnects. None of this was done because anyone said so. I only do what I myself have tested and proven to be worth doing. This stuff is dirt cheap. So don't take my word for it either. Just try if you want and see for yourself.

Atmasphere...
Can you recommend some stand-alone phono stages that have the design features you describe? Don’t think I’m smart enough to figure that out for myself, but it would be interesting to give one a try. Thanks!

@mrdecibel 

"What was frightening, we saw little pieces of the record vinyl being torn away from the record, as the stylus passed over. Like rubber off a tire, but reversed ( the record was the road )."

Yes, the velocities and forces in action are huge. Therefore it's safe to say tracking ability is what counts most. Of course its a complicated business but isn't everything in audio? Or even life?  

The following article on tracking may be of interest but 5 minutes or so of meditation beforehand may be needed due to the complexity involved.

http://www.phaedrus-audio.com/further_tracking.htm

Can you recommend some stand-alone phono stages that have the design features you describe? Don’t think I’m smart enough to figure that out for myself, but it would be interesting to give one a try. Thanks!

I know Nelson Pass makes a stable phono section; not sure if its a stand-alone product or not. IME a simple way to sort it out is to see if installing a "cartridge loading" (its really 'detuning') resistor makes the sound different. If not, then the phono section is probably stable.
FWIW Jonathan Carr and I had a nice conversation about this topic at Munich a few years ago. There was a nice thread on the What's Best forum about cartridge loading in which he was active (his moniker was JCarr) that goes into the 'cartridge loading' aspect of this issue in some depth. The advantage of not having to load the cartridge that he brought up with me was the simple fact that energy has to come from somewhere, so loading the cartridge with a low resistance was going to make the cantilever stiffer and less able to track higher frequencies. He and I have both written a lot about this topic; its pretty obvious that I simply have to post an article on our website that goes into it with more depth so I don't have to keep repeating myself.

mrdecibel

We were shown a video of a stylus tracking a record ( recorded microscopically, and blown up on a large screen ) ... we saw little pieces of the record vinyl being torn away from the record, as the stylus passed over.

I find this very difficult to believe, especially because I can’t recall any other reference to this video, ever. Recording a stylus in a groove is notoriously difficult, and would have been even more difficult in the pre-digital era. Also, other videos of a stylus tracking a groove don’t show this effect, such as this one here. (This video shows apparent damage after skipped grooves, btw, but that’s not normal operation for must of us.)

There’s no apparent damage shown in this animation, either, but this isn’t a real-world representation of a stylus in a groove.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that this claim is fiction is examining an ultrasonic bath after cleaning a bunch of records. Many people have done this experiment, myself included. To make the test meaningful, I used several different colored LPs that I first subjected to multiple plays, followed by a lengthy cleaning. If there were any basis to the claim, bits of colored vinyl would have been found in the bath. But they weren’t.

I’m not accusing mrdecibel of intentionally misleading us, however. Perhaps he just had a nightmare.