The Wild Places is a great album, I'll be buying this set for that alone.

I fortunately have Wild Places, Metro & 2 slightly different cd editions of Streets Of Fire. I will likely buy it anyway (unless there is a hi-res download, which would be heaven for me).

If you have never heard Metro's (Browne & Peter Godwin) stunning original version of Criminal World (which Bowie destroyed on Let's Dance), it's worth it just for that.

Assuming that most of us have heard the Bowie version; think of the same song done by a glam version of Led Zeppelin. It's stunning.

In fact, all 3 of the albums on this comp are stunning. Possibly the most overlooked & under-rated artist of the late 70's UK new wave/romantic/prog scene (I know that covers a lot of ground!). I hope it's well mastered. The reason I have 2 versions of Streets is the Line edition sounds awful & the Castle is missing 1 song (Cancion De Cuna Street Echoes (For M.).

Another observation from a long time fanatic: imo, Mark Knopfler stole his entire style from 1 song here: Fauvette

Don't even stop to think................BUY THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'd appreciate comments on sound quality from anyone who purchases this.

For those who care, while musically this compilation is superb; it is much louder than the original Sanctuary CD's. DR9 & DR10 aren't usually considered totally brickwalled, but most of this is hard for me to listen to.

The originals:

Metro is DR13
Wild Places/Streets Of Fire is DR12

This has 3 true exclusives:
Cancion De Cuna Street Echoes (For M.) (from Streets Of Fire, left off the "2fer" due to length; it's on the Line which is NOT from a 1st generation tape)
China Girl (previously not on cd afaik)
The Toys (previously not on cd afaik)

The Metro single edit is on "Metro" & the solo single edits aren't important to me (& Camino Real (Pts 2 And 3) (Single Edit) was accidentally put on the German Line cd in place of the full version).

Really a shame that yet ANOTHER great album was ruined by a heavy hand on the compressor during mastering.

I made a home made upgrade of this:

Wherever possible (all but 3 tracks), I reconstructed it from better sounding masters. Ironically (& fortunately) the 3 hard to find tracks were the best sounding masters on this setl! I also added a few rarities from Journey & Love & War, & Peter Godwin's (Browne's partner in Metro) 1 hit; Images Of Heaven; & left out most of the worthless single edits. It will make a great car mix cd set!

I also discovered that my better sounding originals are selling for a fortune on Amazon (I'm going to keep them for the moment).

I'm playing the above comp I made on my main system.

The Castle masters are so good, it reminds me why I got into highend audio in the first place.

It's really a shame the Castle's/Sanctuary's went out of print.