Are your record surfaces as silent as CDs?

I have found some older first-pressing vinyl albums that are dead quiet in  my collection. Especially after a good cleaning. Taking care of them for decades helps and the fact that I was doing a lot of digital listening compared to vinyl the last 15yrs meant nominal wear and tear too. However, I have new vinyl pressings, freshly bought and cleaned, that don't sound nearly as quiet as some older pressings which means I might need to put the newer vinyl through the record cleaner once more to remove the factory crud. 

Surprisingly, I have a few records that look visually ok and expect them to play noisy and with a good cleaning they are quieter than I would have expected. 

An LP can never be as quiet as a CD in terms of low frequency noise, because RBCDs have a brick wall filter at around 20Hz; there is nothing below that frequency on a CD.  Which is one reason I DON"T like CDs. That emphatic dead silent and abrupt cut-off is unnatural and robs the bass frequencies of a sense of realism. Harry Pearson called it lack of "downward dynamic range", and he was correct.

Technically, vinyl can only give you about 60db S/N exclusive of the pre-amp (although different vinyls these days provide somewhat better that that)

@pcolvin Actually LP surfaces can be quite a bit lower noise than that. Acoustic Sounds found that the rush of LP surfaces was mostly caused by vibration in the pressing machines so they applied damping and were able to reduce the noise floor a good 10-15 dB. Projects we did (I ran an LP mastering operation for about 20 years) through their plant (QRP) certainly suggest this is so: when we got the run done, the surfaces were so quiet the electronics were the noise floor so we were wondering if the system was running and then music erupted from the speakers.

When I got my new analog setup (please refer to my profile if interested) I was very surprised that surface noise virtually disappeared from most of my records.  It’s like I was listening to CDs.  I’m wondering if others have had that same experience.with their setup.

@rvpiano  Phono sections can generate ticks and pops due to a poor high frequency overload margin. This can happen with either high output MM cartridges or LOMC cartridges. Tube preamps tend to have a much higher input overload character owing to the much higher voltages used in a tube phono section, so they are more likely to be immune to ultrasonic and RF noise generated by the cartridge.

The way this works is the cartridge has an inductance which is in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable. An electrical resonance ensues that can be 20dB (in the case of MM cartridges) or 30dB (in the case of LOMC cartridges) higher, about 10 to about 38x higher than the cartridge signal itself. If the phono section input gets overloaded it will create a tick, pop or hiss. Once this problem is fixed (which is a design issue) the LP surface will seem to have gotten a lot quieter. 

I'm very used to playing entire LP sides without any ticks or pops and I don't clean my records other than using a carbon fiber dust brush before each play.

From the studies I've done in this area (I design and manufacture preamps and amps) I'm convinced that anyone playing LPs in the 1970s or 80s grew up with phono sections that had this problem (the majority of phono sections included in common amps and receivers from Japan for example). My hypothesis is that designers at the time only thought that they needed enough gain and the right EQ, not taking into account the implication of an inductive source in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable.

@atmasphere 

Thanks for the explanation.

“I'm very used to playing entire LP sides without any ticks or pops and I don't clean my records other than using a carbon fiber dust brush before each play”

I have the same experience, except that I occasionally use a cleaning machine which improves the SQ.

@tomcy6 You may not have noticed, but digital streaming is now making up about 85% of record company revenues. That may have something to do with the decline of cd sales.

CD sales in the US market actually had an uptick in 22 and 23 compared to several years ago.  Especially considering outside of the U.S. the CD format is still the most popular format for listening to music. In the UK, CDs were the most popular format in 2023.

Strangely enough, digital downloads are on the decline while compared to physical sales of CDs and Vinyl being up in 2023.

For those of us who collect physical music as a hobby, we are clearly a shrinking source of  revenue for the music industry.