I sometimes wonder if those of us who grew up on vinyl tend to have a greater tolerance for surface noise. The occasional pop or crackle is nothing to me if it’s not too loud … an LP has to be in pretty bad shape before it starts to seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the music. (Of course, the threshold depends very much on the nature of the music. If the LP has a lot of quiet passages, surface noise becomes much more of a problem, but your basic rock-n-roll LP can be crackling away between tracks and once the tune starts up the surface noise is unnoticeable.) But if I’d been listening to digital all my life I might feel differently.