What Vinyl quality should I be using?

An absolute necessity is a record cleaning machine with vacuum. Any other means of cleaning is just pushing the dirt around. You will be amazed how good old vinyl can sound with a good cleaning.

Dcstep, I just went through the process of cleaning just about every one of my 2,000 albums (stored for the past 20 years or so) with Disc Doctor cleaning system. Yes, the cleaning with carbon fiber brush, zerostat, micro fiber cloth, the whole deal. While the albums were much cleaner, I was still not completely happy, too much surface noise. Recently I purchased a VPI 16.5, only then did I learn how dirty these records remained after the previous cleaning. Much quieter, lower noise floor adds up to increased resolution. Any cleaning without vacuuming leaves a residue which you will hear. Vacuuming is absolutely necessary!

Come on, I'm not dumb enough not to have rinsed with distilled water. There is still residue left on those records, I hear and see it after each play.
Have you guys even tried a rcm with vacuum? The vacuum simply cleans off that remaining residue better than rinsing. Now for high pressure rinsing, I might go for that.

I could also make an analogy to the automatic car wash. Would you rather have your car dried with the vacuums or clean rags, I choose the vacuum. No matter how clean those rags are they pick up some of the remaining residue and drag that around. Again, I hear a quieter surface with vacuum cleaning.

We will agree to disagree, others will have to judge for themselves.

I don't want to belabor the subject, but I never said that hand cleaning vinyl was inherently inferior to machine cleaning. My claim is that vacuuming as a final step is superior to hand drying. Every record I've played thus far has been cleaned by hand, and then cleaned again on the VPI 16.5. This is I believe, the superior way to clean vinyl, all future cleaning will still include the hand cleaning.
As to the subject at hand, records worth playing can be found at garage sales, record shows (if they still exist), flea markets, used record stores, new from web retailers,etc., in other words wherever you can find them. Visual inspection is ok, a demo play is best. Most of my 2,000 plus records are from shows, used record stores and garage sales, very little new vinyl.