Vinyl cleanliness

that's the medium. Its a mechanical device and it traces a record made of vinyl there has to be noise.I don't care how well designed a TT and Tonearm system is. It has to make some kind of noise other then whats recorded.

The albums that I bought new during the past 40 years 90%. The used albums that I have bought about 50%. Many of the extra "sounds" are not from surface contaminates that can be cleaned away, but from permanent vinyl damage either from poor cartridge alignment, worn out stylus use, or other inadvertent happenings while in the posession of the previous owners.

none. But will have to admit that some of the new 180 gram vinyl starts out pretty amazingly quite . Favourite new albums ( Jeff Beck "Emotion and Commotion fer instance) do pick up surface noise after may be 30 to 50 plays - still not terrible.
The puzzle for me is how some albums I've had for 40 years and have got to have been played hundreds of times - still are remarkably quite - other after 20-30 plays sound pretty noisy ?

Even very quiet records might have some light ticks. Usually it doesn't get in the way of the music.