How do you get past the pops and hiss of LPs?

Switch from classical to rock to drown out the sound of the hardware.

You can pretend you are listening with a big roaring fire in the listening room.

Charlie

If the records are permanently damaged, no cleaning will bring them back to life. If the records are properly cleaned and your vynil rig / phono section is of good quality and properly set-up, surface noise is not a problem at all. A decent linear tracking table, even a mass produced direct drive model, will make this fact oh-so clear to you. Pivoted arms are harder to work with in terms of cartridge geometry and more likely to be misaligned, doing further damage to the record with each playing. Sean
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I beleive Sean has nailed this one, no amount of cleaning or snake oil can ever restore a damaged LP. Sometimes when I read the posts I beleive some people dont want to hear the truth, the truth is anolog takes a lot of effort and time to get it right. But if done right it can be truly heaven. I noticed in the post your father said it allways sounded that way, it sounded that way for me also until I began to take it seriously. I beleive a a good example would be if you take a Yugo to the racetrack,it will go around the track but you may be last. You need good equipment to WORK IN CONCERT with each other. If all are done right, incudeing the LP`s condition all a person can say is WHOW. David

Sean is right on with his comments. The issue is not LPs it is more likely the LPs you have. I have LPs that are decades old and still sound very good. Many LPs that people played for years without any proper care are going to sound 'beat', because they have been abused. I refer to the damage done to the groove by dragging a dirty cartridge through them, not some terible form of violence. The problem is not the format, it is the miscare of the the medium.

Pops and hiss are not recorded onto the LP, and unless an LP has been abused it will be easy to clean. At which point it will be vastly superior to CDs and even SACDs.

How good would the average digital based system sound if the CDs were tossed around or abused??? At least the LPs will play. The CDs aren't even usable.

Any medium or product will last a long time, and sound good as long as it is well cared for by it's owner.