Anyone notice different amounts of surface noise with different arms?

Dragging a rock through a spiral groove on a rotating plastic disk will always have surface noise. 

It is not the arm. It is a slight difference in the cartridge alignment. Small changes in overhang and VTA can affect the amount of surface noise you hear. All the best arms of similar mass are going to sound exactly the same as long as cartridge alignment is exactly the same.

@larryi I wish I had your imagination. 

Ivor Tiefenbrun of Linn would not agree that "all the best arms of similar mass sound exactly the same" unless you define "the best" as those that sound the same! He was notorious for throwing records around during demonstrations, in part to show that scratches, pops and crackles were far less obvious with Linn products. He went to enormous lengths to minimise free play between the record and the stylus, for example by using the same grade of stainless steel so bearings and other components expanded and contracted at the same rate, and therefore could be adjusted to very tight tolerances. Propagation of unwanted impulses was suppressed, especially compared with popular arms such as those by SME, who did not make turntables at that time.
I am assuming the same cartridge in both arms, correctly aligned.

The name "tone-arm" says it all!  If they are neutral, they would be called pick-up arms or similar.

May I make a suggestion!  To eliminate cartridge set up variables, play a silent track, that is one containing no musical information, so no VTA adjustment, tracking force, or overhang comes into the equation.  The groove contains nothing but inherent vinyl noise, plus any extraneous wear and tear.  I use a test disk from Analogue Productions "The ultimate analogue test LP". 

The output is turntable noise plus record noise.  For analysis, I feed the microphone output from my pre-amplifier into the audio jack on my laptop, using the first free (home use only) analysis software I found on the web, WavePad by NCN Software.

Come to think of it, I have not seen a waterfall graph published for ages - about the time magazines stopped publishing useful stuff like speaker impedance curves.