New Vinyl - "scratchy"?

I have to ask the obvious, did you clean it thourghly before listening? You know, mold release chemicals and all that crap.

If you cleaned it well first, you're probably just the unlucky purchaser of a poorly pressed copy. Unfortunately, If you buy enough new vinyl releases, you're bound to occasionally get a noisy copy. It's one of the annoying pitfalls of this hobby. Some labels/pressing plants are worse than others. There's little accountability for this as far as the pressing plants and record distributors. If a retailer chooses to replace a noisy copy for a customer, they generally aren't going to be reimbursed by anyone.

Maybe it needs to play a few times. I have read statements on older MFSL pressings indicating MFSL records will sometimes exhibit ticks and pops on the first few plays because the records are not "dehorned" at the factory, done in an effort to preverve the highest possible fidelity. Maybe this is the same thing. Or, its a poorly pressed copy-its happened to me. Any good record store will exchange it.

Also worth trying on a friends system to see if it's not specific to your sysytem. When I got my 45rpm Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince G Trio it was scratchy. A year later after I changed the Dynavector XV-1s for a Colibri XGP I coencidentaly found that it sounds perfect on this combo. The only thing that stopped me returning it to AcousticSounds as faulty was the shipping costs, but as it turns out it sounds okay now.