tt surface noise reduce or tolerate?

Crem1, what do you mean by 'Lps fail'? I've had LPs for 35 years now but I have yet to see one fail. OTOH I've seen a few CDs failing recently. For me, 'fail' means it won't play or degrades significantly **with proper storage**. LPs IME do not fail but CDs and most all tapes do.

A far better explanation would have been to focus on manufacturing defects. "Fail" was a short-cut term to denote a negative experience that that i used to "cross-bridge", as a reference for persons that have little or no experience with needle-discs ,but have some connection to CD's,tape ,or I Pods where fail is sometime outlined in trouble shooting-type texts.

My mistake to the keen eye but I think we both can agree that LP ownership does require a learning curve that is quite different than what the young adults experience with other media. All the best.

The longevity of LPs is something I can't argue about. The very first LP I acquired, used, about 1954, the musical "Wonderful Town", I can still play today. In that time interval Mag Tape, which until CDs was the only alternative, has gone through several format changes rendering earlier formats unplayable.

I can't tell you how many "new" pressings I bought were very noisy. I thought I was getting all the crap and everyone else was getting the good stuff. Many times it's the pressing. Trying to lessen the effects is the trick. So many things control surface noise intensity. The preamp, the phonostage w/in the preamp. Certainly all the things others have mentioned.
I use a tube phono with my SS gear. Depending upon the tubes used I can make srfce noise better or worse. anything that accents the HF will generaly increase SN. Room acoustics is a BIG one as well.
Compared to others systems I have heard my SN was always exagerated. Now most of my SN issues are from the loud noises eminating from the LP sometimes singly or many in short time frame. I can't say that I get a continuous groove noise such as maybe you are describing. That would be red flag as a arm/cart/TT set up in my book. You may want to look at the cart loading as well.

noise floor has dropped a lot since got the heavy mat from kabusa, the tonearm dampen kit from kabusa, and had the cartridge professionally aligned including tonearm height set by eliot midwood from acoustic image in los angeles.

michael