unwanted noise at the beginning of audio

When I trigger playback on any audio file via 'sfplay', I get extra / unwanted noise at the beginning of it if there is silence at the beginning of the track. A very high white noise plays as long as there is silence until the audio stem / wave grows into audible sound. This only happens the first time I trigger it after opening the patch; every time after that, this doesn't happen.

I'm wondering if there is a remedy to this other than always making sure the sound starts right at the beginning of each track, especially since, in many of my samples, silence is more prominent than sound -- and thus it is annoying to have to meticulously prepare tracks (with delays in place of the silence) with this potentially avoidable problem in mind.

I've had this problem before with a previous edition of max (4 or 5), then didn't use it for a couple years, and now (with max 7) I notice that the same problem persists. I haven't found any other topics about this issue after searching, but surely this isn't only happening for me. I can provide a minimum working example if necessary (which would literally be a 'load' message attached to 'sfplay' + 'toggle' + 'dac') -- I am just away from the computer that has Max installed at the moment; but I'm also suspicious that I may be missing an obvious setting of some sort.

Thanks for any help!