Outstanding setup where do I begin?

I recently inherited a great setup from my father along with tons of 33's. The problem is I have no idea how to set it up. I thought it was set up when I picked it up however, I cannot seem to get clean sound from it. When I turn on the integrated amp, the preamp/receiver, the turn table, and the tube phono pre-amp I seem to get a section of the full sound spectrum. From what I have been told its a pretty nice setup and for brevity I will just state what I have and what I have done.

Oracle Delphi Mark 5
Graham 1.5 (might be a 1.5T not sure how to differentiate)
ZYX Yatra Cartridge
Jolida Preamp

The Oracle was already built, I cleaned reoiled the platform and the tone arm according to both manuals. According to specs, the motor pulley needed to be 77mm from the top of the motor to the stage which it was lower causing the drive belts to slip off when the platform stopped so I adjusted it to the proper height. Fixed that problem. The cartridge was mounted with the guide provided between the 1 and 2 markings. The problem here is that the tonearm wants to return to the locking stand (not enough weight as I saw on a digital scale?), now I dont know if this is proper practice or not but I read in the Graham manual that for cartridges under 20 grams remove the auxilary weight, I found some screws on the back of the weights and removed the last weight. I placed the tone arm and cartridge with guard on a digital scale and adjusted it for 2 grams accounting for the guard weight. This allowed the tone arm to stay in track and not swing back. The tracking weight indicator is set at 2.

I configured the dim switches on the Jolida for MC1 100 Ohms and plugged the outputs to the receiver/preamp phono jack on low level.

The problems are that I am picking up some intermitant static, and as I said before there are definite soundstage, imaging, and tonal losses (sounds like a crappy radio).

What have I done wrong? What can I do to fix this? I am BRAND NEW to the analog circuit and just really want to get this thing going in the right direction. What other balancing considerations do I have to take into consideration? The azimuth balanancing... what settings or how do I tell if its balanced (the anti skating weight really messes things up here)? What are things that drastically affect sound quality. Please dont be too harsh as I am new, but I understand if my ignorance displeases you as I have tried to educate myself at a fast pace.

Thanks for any help.