How do you lower surface noise when playing LPs?

Answer 1

Reducing surface noise on LPs can be difficult, depending on the amount of damage.

The first thing to do is remove as much surface dirt as possible. Various techniques include the use of a soft camel's-hair brush or a piece of velvet cloth, moved in the direction of the grooves. Gently blowing air across the surface can help remove loosened dirt, but use something like a photo dust remover. Canned compressed air for cleaning computer keyboards has propellants and is quite cold, both of which can damage an LP. Blowing from your mouth risks accidentally getting saliva on the disk, which can be pretty gross.

Once surface dirt has been removed, you should use a good-quality turntable with an adjustable-weight tonearm. Keep the tonearm weight within the manufacturer's recommended limits. An old child's player or other low-quality turntable will do more harm than good.

After you've done those things, the rest of the work is electronic. My own experience has been to make a direct copy of the LP onto a computer using as little adjustment as possible. I.e. no equalization, and record at a volume that limits the loudest passages to the "0 db" marking on the recording software's volume meter.

Now that you have a "raw" or "base" recording, you can use any one of a number of different music-editing programs to try to clean up the music further. One particularly good, free program is called Audacity. It provides adjustable hiss and click filters that can be applied to the base recording, so you can experiment to find what's most pleasing (or least disturbing) to your ears. Of course you should always keep the base copy separate so you can go back to it later if needed; don't save the cleaned recording in its place.

If the record is too badly damaged to be recovered using these home techniques, there are several private companies that specialize in restoring LPs and older recordings. However their services can be expensive so you'll have to decide whether what you're trying to restore is worth the money, not to mention searching online to see if it's already been released on CD or mp3.