Turntable as tuner?

Do you have a tuner connected to your preamp/integrated amp, as well? If so, it is common enough ... you are experiencing bleed through. I have noticed this with a vintage Marantz receiver that I have. If I have the selector set to AUX and turn the volume way up, I can hear the radio very faintly. To my knowledge, there is no servicing that is required.

Regards, Rich

Yes, actually it's a preamp/tuner. The funny thing is that no other devices exhibit this behavior no matter how high I turn up the volume. Why only the phono? BTW, I've switched the phono stage to other inputs (the B&K has 5 identical inputs plus tape in/out) and the same thing happens, but when I plug a CD player into the same place -- lovely silence. I've also tried switching out the interconnects one by one (no effect). I _have_ discovered that if I power off the phono stage the noise goes away, while turning off the TT doesn't get rid of it.

Does the station you hear change when you tune the tuner? If not, then bleed through is not the issue. You are receiving RFI frm the station. The high gain required for the phono board acts much like an RF preamplifier and he input stage of the preamp is acting like a detector. Try som clamp on RFI filters from Radio Shack. Also try some better interconnects between turntable and preamp and preamp to your line stage. Could also be a damaged ground in your tone arm. In any case, sounds more like RFI than bleedthrough since bleed through should be just as bad with a CD playing through the same set of inputs.

sensorman

I agree with the RFI diagnosis. I had a similar problem in a previous (high RFI) location and the problem had to do with direct sight lines coming through the windows. Things you can try (those blockers did nothing for me): 1.try rotating the pre-tuner 90 degrees
2.hold up a piece of steel (baking sheet?) between the pre/tuner and the windows and see if that affects the RFI
3.if it turns out that #2 does affect the RFI beneficially, but steel between the source of the problem and the pre/tuner is not an option, you might consider relocating the components to a completely different location - I had to literally have my system one floor down (which was under street level) with only the speakers above - to really eliminate the RFI

Good luck! It's a tough problem!