tt surface noise reduce or tolerate?

Plato, Atmasphere and Stringreen are right. If you do things properly, which needs experience and patience and quite a bit of dough alas, vinyl reproduction can be so quiet that Tvad would be quite surprised. Perfect setup, a well designed TT and properly cleaned LPs are essential. The importance of a quality phono preamp is often underestimated. I run a Benz and a Souchy, have highly sensitive plasma speakers next to my stators and am never bothered by hiss and it is exactly as Stingreen points out, if there is an occasional scratch on the lp, it is heard on another plane apart from the music and as Atmasphere so rightly says, often my friends think I'm playing digital and are wondering why suddenly the music has so much bloom.
By the way, I do not wish to enter or fuel the digital-analog debate here. With certain kinds of music, I find digital preferable to vinyl, but only if treated with the same care to detail and not as plug and play.

Well, I haven't picked up a Radiohead LP for a while so maybe I'll check this one out. It is possible that it is just poor quality vinyl. But then, there needs to be a reason to get people to shell out for the 180/45 double lp. ;-)

Some will argue otherwise, but I do clean new records. Better safe than sorry to my mind. Anyway, I would think that the surface noise should be no greater than tape hiss. If that means anything to you.

Tvad, reason and what has remained of school physics demand that I agree with you. Often enough surface noise is masked by the music, no doubt about that. But with some LPs, even in silent passages, there is just no surface noise and I swear that my ears are still good. Of course this is not true of all Lps, but there seems to be vinyl which is practically without noise, if everything else is done right. Wished I knew why this is so.

Dan, I listen to a lot of tapes, old prerecorded ones and the new ones from the Tape Project. Also here, no tape is like the other. Some hiss terribly, others don't at all, however even the avarage LP runs much quieter than the average tape, at least with my rig.