Does anyone own any of the Melanie two-fer reissues on Edsel out of England? I believe they just came out this year and am curious as to the sound and packaging? Thanks.

There's some info in the earlier thread about these reissues:

viewtopic.php?t=11933

But no one has commented on the sound quality yet.

I have the Edsel Melanie albums. Sound is really good. Packaging stinks. The photos are small and look like third or fourth generation copies. The booklet covers are especially bad. Lots of annotation, though. It is good to have these back in print. The first two albums are on one disc. The next two sets (Candles in the Rain/Leftover Wine and Good Book/Gather Me) are two discs each with generous bonus tracks.

Where did you order them from? I want to get them at some point, but the Amazon prices on these seem to go all over the place (and I couldn't find any combined shipping from any of the merchants on this end).

Where did you order them from? I want to get them at some point, but the Amazon prices on these seem to go all over the place (and I couldn't find any combined shipping from any of the merchants on this end).[/quote]

I ordered them from Caiman (or whoever that drop shipper is in Florida) via Amazon. $2.59 per disc for shipping but their prices for the discs themselves were reasonable considering 2 of the 3 are two disc sets and they are imports. Shipping took about a week. I've used them for several purchases and have been pretty happy.

I ordered the 2fer with Gather Me today.

I think Gather Me is the best of the albums that are now available. What would be the second side of the original album just flows seamlessly. Railroad, Kansas, Center of the Circle are some of her best songs. What a pleasure to have this again.

I just compared the new edition of Gather Me to the limited 1992 France version. Perhaps the most telling comment is the last time I tried to compare them a couple weeks back, either my refrigerator or wash machine was running & I couldn't tell any difference!

The Edsel is better then the C-Five, but both have sonic problems. The out of print French release has a significant amount of tape hiss, some wow & flutter & was mastered at too low of a level (yes, bet you never thought you'd hear that from ol' anti compression me; but there is a point on the opposite end of the spectrum where we're not getting the full 16 bit resolution if the level is too low. And as most audiophile's know, 16 bit isn't good enough to start with. The worst example I've run into on this is the first generation Bruce Cockburn releases on ESD.)

The Edsel has the highs a bit chopped off (to get rid of the tape hiss?) & a lesser amount of (but still present) wow & flutter. The Edsel also sounds like it was mastered at too low of a level (or are these 50 year old ears getting more used to compression then I thought)?

I am nitpicking a bit, the discs sound fine on my pc & are also acceptable on my high end system.

I'm really surprised that they apparently haven't sold many of these; Over the last 20 years there's been just tons of complaining about Melanie's catalog being unavailable. I've got this set, a couple greatest hits & a couple of the One Ways; unless there's some sort of a high res remaster I'm done.

After I wrote the above, I sat down at my pc & played the entire Edsel Gather Me cd. While this ain't a high res system, my Advent speakers are some of th best pc speakers i've ever heard. I've decided the muted top end is definately the cd, not my ears. It kind of sounds like a pre-recorded cassette tape without the hiss. I suspect the original master just isn't real good. I BELIEVE this was the first album Melanie & her husband did by themselves. Great music, though!

From what I've heard, the reason no record company wants to deal with Melanie (and probably the reason why reissues of her music has been so spotty) IS her manager/husband.