Vinyl Care & Dust Removal, How to make vinyl sound good?? Options

[ViPER1313]

After reading the thread found here [ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....t=7953&hl=vinyl ] I was blown away by the recording quality of the sandra.mpc sample. How do you get vinyl to sound so dust free and rich? All the vinyl that I have recorded has at least some dust crackling in the background, and some recordings sound extremely harsh (especially in the vocals - almost like clipping except there is no clipping going on.....) Do you use digital correction? Filtering? I use the following equipment -

Marantz TT1060 Turntable w/ unknown cartridge/needle (the cartridge/needle are replacements, less than 6 months old - I have no idea what brand / model they are, but they seem to be of decent quality.)

Marantz PM325 Receiver

SB-Live soundcard fed from phono -> receiver -> line-in (This is not the weak link I am concerned over - I know it has crappy quality recording, but I am worried about the record playback quality itself . I have also tried phono -> line-in directly and was not impressed with the quality at all.)

The cartridge seems to have good frequency response and be of decent quality, but I can not get rid of dust no matter what I try - I have a diskwasher and have tried a 1:5 alcohol/water solution, but the dust persists. Any tips?

[ViPER1313]

Here is a sample using the PM325's tape outputs to the line in on my SB-Live. The source was recorded at 44,100hz 16bit PCM in Goldwave, time corrected to 1.02x the original speed, and saved as a .wav file. The .wav file was recorded to Vorbis v1.0 -q6 , with no equalization done at the amp or computer level. Also, the weight on the turn-table's tone arm was increased ever so slightly over the last samples. Please ignore the dust.

Note: MPC -q5 v1.14 didn't seem to like the dust in this clip - it made it sound washed out IMO, if that is possible. Vorbis was chosen instead to do the encoding job. Also, no normalization or replay gain has been performed on this clip at the .wav or .ogg level.

Peter Tosh Record Sample