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

TWL and co: talk about selective logic. All this dubious stuff about hearing through LP playback noise or that the noise is in another plane and does not take away from the enjoyment of the recording. What you had to begin with is a candid question by someone who was taken aback by the surface noise of vinyl reproduction. All the usual responses: the discs require cleaning with an expensive machine, the cart is not good enough, the arm is not good enough, the preamp is not good enough, the table is not good enough, the VTA is wrong, the whole set-up is wrong, you need to "invest" in very expensive equipment, you need to retrain your ear to a new and better paradigm and so on. A simple question was asked, and all that is provided is the doctrinaire view on the superiority of vinyl. Has anyone asked what type of music the original poster listens to? Seems to me that listening mainly to rock or metal, the noise issue is not much of a concern. Any music where silence is an integral part and the noise is clearly audible. If audio is a subjective thing, is the original poster's concern about surface noise not a valid consideration? Maybe telling him that if sounds bad to his ears, it is bad is a better subjective audio response that trying to convince him that (a) it's not there and (b) whatever noise is there should be ignored. Making of necessity virtue is wearing thin as an argument.

And yet, Eldartford, vinyl proponents will tell you that LP reproduction maintains more of the original music than digital recordings because they don't, for the most part, understand sampling theory and think that somehow the "heart" of the music is being removed. Wrong or inexistant bass, errors in matching the RIAA curve, distortion are not seen as losing anything - only digital loses things, in their minds.

As others (although not many on this forum) have stated, I consider the quality of the silences in music to be just as important as the sound in the music.

Pbb, tlak about the pot calling the kettle black. Yours is a fine example of selective logic. The original poster described noise and ASKED if he was doing something wrong and should he ignore the hiss. He did not mention if these were records that were clean or filthy, they were very old or damaged, or what kind of rig he was using to play them.

I have seen mention here of ignoring the occasional pop or tick, but not that he should ignore all noise. There are many factors that might induce noise. Cleaning the records might be a very good first step. If the records have actual damage, he might replace them with a better copy. If he is using some old record player or a decent TT with a defective or damaged stylus/cartridge, even a very modest upgrade might be of benefit. Who is to say that if he cleans and otherwise dirty record, replaces an otherwise damaged record, or plays it on a decent rig, that he will NOT hear the noise he currently does and find even better sound than the "warmer than CD" sound he also describes?

I would point out that "snap, crackle, pop" and hiss are entirely different issues. Perhaps it is more the former he is hearing and not the latter. The former can be easily addressed in most all cases, using the selective logic approaches mentioned. In my experience, hiss is generally never found as a result of the LP itself unless it is an older recording derived from noisy tape OR there is some kind of RF getting into the electronics chain of events. Nothing unique to vinyl, though. Listen to old Louis Armstrong recordings on CD. Where did all that hiss come from? The CD? Obviously not.

This brings up another point. If your CD deck lens is damaged, the CD has muck and scrapes, or you are using a Walkman as a front end, will those CD's sound great? Would it be valid for someone to post a thread wondering how such CD's sounded bad? And, would suggesting remedies in these areas constitute selective logic or an indictment of CD as a format?

As for the occasional pops and clicks. There are many recordings which I have on LP and CD and I have decent rigs to play both. The LP's nearly always win out over the CD version and, have others have said, a click here or there is outweighed by the improvement in sound. Once in awhile, to be fair, the CD in a re-mastered version will score big. When it does I can enjoy and appreciate its sound. Let us face facts, both mediums have there limitations, not the least of which is the ability of the engineers to record and transfer the masters appropriately. Along these lines, the talk of missing LF on LP's is simply a red herring. For every LP I can toss out there with missing LF, I can throw out a CD that is sterile with no dynamics.

"Making of necessity virtue is wearing thin as an argument."

I am not really sure what this means but, continual and gratuitous bashing of any one medium without objectively looking at the equally onerous shortcomings of another is also wearing very thin.

Motdathird, a very well reasoned response.

I have had many CDP's over the last 20 years and yes I've had nearly as many TT's In my own mind the upgrade was about equal each time I bought a better TT I bought a better CDP also. Right now I have about the same amount of money invested in each. The CDP and the table, arm, and cartridge retail for about $3500 each. In theory they should be of equal sound quality.

I attend concerts and hear live music regularly, and use that as the point of reference. When I listen at home to 'cleaned' records and CDs of which I have the same thing on cd, SACD, or vinyl I have yet to hear a digital recording that sounds as good as vinyl. Is my system so inferior that I cannot detect the differences? Am I just to stupid to notice that CDs really sound better? Or is it that I spent the money to buy what I consider to be a very good (and expensive) CD player, but that I'm still unwilling to give the CDP a fair chance? What am I doing wrong???

I apologize to Kemp. I see that he said he is using the Thorens. That will work!