When you first heard Loveless, did you think your copy was defective? Did you bring it back to the store and ask for your money back?

& I came away with a replacement copy which may or may not have been better, think it was actually.

Was going to say, someone must have had a defective copy.

I did not think my copy of Loveless was defective (everyone's talking about "To Here Knows When" presumably), nor "Djed" off of Millions Now Living Will Now Die... but I will admit that the "moment" circa 3m21s of "Golden Ball" off of Transient Noise Bursts With Announcements had me scrambling across the room to my turntable on the first spin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sTN9ozglRo

My copy of TRNBWA is the only CD I've purchased that DID have a defect! A scratch that killed off the last two tracks. New CD as well. Monsieur Le Fopp, you truly spoiled it!

the initial scene release of the comlag ep by radiohead had a glitch on one track, short bursts of crunchy white noise here and there, that i thought was intentional (on the part of radiohead not the mp3 encoder)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Conclusive!

Man taht cassette is not cheap to find

Only a few people bought Loveless when it first came out, but every one of them wanted their money back

So they could buy even more copies?

xps I bought a CD copy of Björk's Vespertine the day it came out and noticed while listening that it had a small, deep scratch that caused a couple of tracks to skip. I took my copy back to the store (RIP Streetside Records STL) to exchange it, and the clerk looked at it and said "huh, that's a defect." He started opening every copy they had, and surely enough that identical scratch was present on about half of them. They gladly exchanged it for a clean copy. Did anyone else ever encounter a defective Vespertine? I don't remember hearing anything about it after that.

Also I believe that was the same day Stereolab's Sound-Dust dropped. Good day for Elektra Records!

When I first heard it I was deliriously happy and wondered how I’d lived without it.

Two tracks were singles and I'd heard Only Shallow on the radio anyway.

First time I played it was on a CD-ROM drive that was kind of (in theory) rad in itself in 1991.

^ Exactly. Pretty sure I hadn't heard "Only Shallow" itself but "When You Sleep" and the singles had been on radio here for months before I borrowed a library copy. I'm kinda impressed that so many people seemingly procured stuff based purely on... what? Particularly vague recommendations, or something?

I think I read a review in the VV or somewhere. I only remember having the cassette and being infatuated and playing it in the car for my friends

Shields should just come out and say "we didn't intend for it to sound that way, but we left the tapes out in the sun and we didn't want to redo them"