Issue with Phono Playback.

By 'snow', I take it you mean you hear a slight hissing or white-noise sound. This is the noise level of the headphone amplifier in the Sony receiver. A better quality headphone amplifier would have less or none of this noise. But it is not terribly offensive if you don't notice it while music is playing. Since it doesn't distort the music signal you can "listen through it". Of course a small amount of low-level detail is being obscured by this noise. When you have complete silence between notes, rather than some amount of noise, it brings the music into sharper focus and in my opinion makes it more dynamic and lifelike.

The high note sound may be distortion - I thought a "plosive" was the sound made when air is forcibly expelled from the mouth, like saying the letter 'P'. This is a normal sound if it doesn't overload the microphone. Your sound that only occurs on high notes may be a distortion of the signal and could be caused my a number of things, maybe related to the phono cartridge alignment or stylus wear, or maybe an electronic problem in the receiver, like an aging capacitor or transistor. You could try a CD of the same recording and see if it distorts in the same place. If not it is probably something with the turntable setup rather than the receiver although it could still be in the receiver phono section.

That's about all I can think of, hope it is helpful.

Good advice from Kh6idf.

I'm glad you listen to headphones. Actually you can get the very best state of the art sound for a few thousand dollars with headphones as opposed to many thousands of dollars for big and good amps and speakers. Check out Headphone.com for great headphone information. They have wonderful guidance toward audio Nervana. I agree with KH6idf regarding the hiss. The Sony uses an op amp for the headphone output and is not "audiophile" quality.

The "plosive" sound on high notes could easily be a flaw or limitation in the receiver, as suggested above, but it's about equally likely to be due to stylus mistracking. If that's the case and it's your stylus that's mistracking, you may be damaging your records.

Clean the stylus and play a suspect passage. If the "plosives" go away, you've found the culprit. Keep the stylus clean. Search for "magic eraser" on this and other vinyl forums for a cheap and effective method.

If the "plosives" remain after stylus cleaning, increase tracking force slightly (by .1 or .2g) and play the suspect passages again. If the "plosive" go away or are reduced, you've found the culprit. Fiddle tracking force until they go away altogether.

Mistracking is a major cause of vinyl damage and it's usually caused by playing with tracking force set too low, which can let the stylus lose contact at higher velocities or amplitudes. If the stylus breaks loose even a little bit, well, the results of a diamond chisel rattling around inside a plastic groove are easy to imagine. That kind of damage can never be repaired, so prevent it for the health of your vinyl.

Note: if these are old records, plays on previous rigs could have damaged them in exactly this way. On replays, the resulting damage sounds virtually identical to actual mistracking. There's an easy way to check, but the above steps should be be done first. It's critical to make sure your rig isn't mistracking.

This is amazing. You all are great! Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to attack it from all of the suggested angles.

Do you think it would be wise to invest in a Grado RA1 amplifier to lessen the white noise?

Thanks again!