I owned this recording on cassette tape back in high school. Then I bought the CD in college. Recently, I purchased on vinyl. The mastering/pressing of the vinyl sounds great... with the exception of "It's the End of the World as We Know It...". The audio is quite distorted throughout this track. I thought that it was a problem with this particular record, and Best Buy accepted my return without any problems. However, the replacement sounds the same. Not Best Buy's fault... this is a vinyl mastering problem. I'll keep the album, but it makes me sad that one of the best tracks on the album sounds so bad.

The LP arrived very dusty/dirty, but mostly cleaned up nicely. A small scuff at the very end of Side 1 makes noisy pops, and there's a single skip on the first song of Side 2. (After repeated cleanings the skip is now more of a very load pop.) The rest of the album sounds great, so given that it was fairly hard to find a new copy I'm OK with the imperfections.

One of the all time best "college rock" albums. R.E.M. at their best.