Yeah, it seems online is the way to go. I'll just have to suck up the shipping costs. haha

For Germany I can only attest that all releases before JPU are only available via Japanese sellers on Amazon or Ebay. Or from Japanese online sellers directly, but then you pay a lot more since they add the German value added tax and handling fees on top, which basically doubles the price if you order less than three or four CDs at a time.

Having a hard time getting all the limited edition CDs...

EDIT: Amending to add the names of the Amazon marketplace sellers I frequent.
- Arc Trade Media_JAPAN (by far the most purchases with them)
- KELINDO³
- samurai media

I give Cd Japan a go, since in UK the like HMV and JPU Records only sell limited stuff of Scandal.

You could had slap me with a wet fish, it would not had sting as much as the custom tax. .plank.

There's a Facebook Group called SCANDAL Merch - Buy/Sell/Trade where fans sell both unopened and pre-loved SCANDAL records and merchandise.

@Andy666

We are just very unlucky where we live, I have used CDJapan for many years and they are fast and reliable, dont blame them for the Custom charges.

When my American friend orders from them he pays nothing

I don't blame CD Japan, like you say we just unlucky were we live. Hopeful next year Britain and Japan will come up with new trade deal, which will make it easy on our wallets.

I will use CD Japan again sometime in August,  maybe a Scandal hoodie as birthday gift for myself 

Andy666 wrote:I give Cd Japan a go, since in UK the like HMV and JPU Records only sell limited stuff of Scandal.

You could had slap me with a wet fish, it would not had sting as much as the custom tax. .plank.

Had a chance to compare a CDJapan edition of Yellow and a JPU edition of Yellow and it seems the latter has slightly lower print quality on the CD booklet? Or maybe they're all the same, just so happens my JPU copy wasn't printed well

I still ended up buying KFTD from JPU because the "her" magazine was fully translated into English, so that's something for non-Jap-speaking fans to consider when making future Scandal purchases

Usually when I buy anything from CDJapan I get a note in my letter-box telling me that there's a package for me in the local sorting office & after I pay the customs duty I can pick it up or they will deliver it. Since the Coronavirus lock-down they don't bother any more. They just deliver it with no Customs Duty or International Handling Fee to pay. 
If you live in the UK & are thinking of buying from CD Japan - do it now.

Wow, thanks for the info !

The Sherwood Shinobi wrote:Usually when I buy anything from CDJapan I get a note in my letter-box telling me that there's a package for me in the local sorting office & after I pay the customs duty I can pick it up or they will deliver it. Since the Coronavirus lock-down they don't bother any more. They just deliver it with no Customs Duty or International Handling Fee to pay. 
If you live in the UK & are thinking of buying from CD Japan - do it now.

I think you are/were lucky (or perhaps CDJ has started to underquote the prices on that invoice they stick on the box for HM Customs to look at).

I received some goodies from CDJ that I had to pick up at the local Parcelforce depot just two weeks ago and I was slapped the usual.

*sigh*

I thought it was too good to be true.

I also had to paid customs duty when I received my last order from CDJapan two weeks ago....
.waaa.

Steadystate wrote:

Andy666 wrote:I give Cd Japan a go, since in UK the like HMV and JPU Records only sell limited stuff of Scandal.

You could had slap me with a wet fish, it would not had sting as much as the custom tax. .plank.

Had a chance to compare a CDJapan edition of Yellow and a JPU edition of Yellow and it seems the latter has slightly lower print quality on the CD booklet? Or maybe they're all the same, just so happens my JPU copy wasn't printed well

I still ended up buying KFTD from JPU because the "her" magazine was fully translated into English, so that's something for non-Jap-speaking fans to consider when making future Scandal purchases

I got same KFTD with magazine from JPU. When I was reading your post it just don to me, is one of members of SH work at JPU I will need to find out and ask the person if they could increase Scandal range.


Hi, got a update. I got a message from JPU, they said they ask the management many times

OK, perhaps I'd better clarify some of my post of 21st.

I suggested that, taking into account the disruption caused by Coronavirus over here & my own experience of understaffed postal services failing to bother with usual international postal charges that, if you live in the UK, this would be a good time to order stuff from Japan. What I should have said is if you are ordering stuff from England, not the UK, as the Government at Westminster has no control of Coronavirus lock-down regulations in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland (which I take to be the cause of this disruption). How long this situation will continue is an unknown  as our Dear Leader, "Barmy" Boris, announces random changes to the lock-down regulations on an almost daily basis.

Certainly my own experience has been that on two deliveries I received in May neither the Customs Duty nor International Handling Fee declared on the box were charged. I have a delivery of two DVDs (DOLLSBOXX & SHOW-YA) on its way from CDJapan at this moment, so we'll see what the situation is about delivery charges when they arrive.

@kudo_maharizu, I can only relate my personal experience. You comment that you paid charges at a Parcelforce office recently. I am reporting on packages processed through the local Royal Mail Delivery Office which is a different outfit. Furthermore you suggest that CDJ may have underquoted the price on the label (which I think they have done occasionally in the past) in order to save me a bob or two, but nevertheless I would expect to still have to pay the Royal Mail International Handling Fee.

Anyway, I think I've laboured this issue long enough.

Andy666 wrote:
Hi, got a update. I got a message from JPU, they said they ask the management many times

Hopefully in future JPU will sell some of Scandal's older products in English. Will definitely save up money for that! 
  

Though it is a fact that JPU Scandal products are much cheaper than the ones on CDJapan, perhaps they have to cut back on quality in some way to make up for it.

In my country, CD shops pretty much don't exist anymore. Many years ago you could still buy jpop CDs including Scandal's from physical shops here (albeit very expensive at 35-50 USD, compared to their "western" counterpart CDs which sold at ~15USD). But now, can't even find shops to buy CDs from, so online is the only choice, crazy shipping costs and all.

I know Japan and Korea still have a bit of CD-buying culture, but it does make me question the long-term relevance of rankings like Oricon, cos they only count physical sales when clearly the rests of the world is moving into a digital age.

The Sherwood Shinobi wrote:OK, perhaps I'd better clarify some of my post of 21st.

I suggested that, taking into account the disruption caused by Coronavirus over here & my own experience of understaffed postal services failing to bother with usual international postal charges that, if you live in the UK, this would be a good time to order stuff from Japan. What I should have said is if you are ordering stuff from England, not the UK, as the Government at Westminster has no control of Coronavirus lock-down regulations in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland (which I take to be the cause of this disruption). How long this situation will continue is an unknown  as our Dear Leader, "Barmy" Boris, announces random changes to the lock-down regulations on an almost daily basis.

Certainly my own experience has been that on two deliveries I received in May neither the Customs Duty nor International Handling Fee declared on the box were charged. I have a delivery of two DVDs (DOLLSBOXX & SHOW-YA) on its way from CDJapan at this moment, so we'll see what the situation is about delivery charges when they arrive.

@kudo_maharizu, I can only relate my personal experience. You comment that you paid charges at a Parcelforce office recently. I am reporting on packages processed through the local Royal Mail Delivery Office which is a different outfit. Furthermore you suggest that CDJ may have underquoted the price on the label (which I think they have done occasionally in the past) in order to save me a bob or two, but nevertheless I would expect to still have to pay the Royal Mail International Handling Fee.

Anyway, I think I've laboured this issue long enough.

And thank you for doing so. I do hope you didn't think I was having a go at you - I just said you were perhaps lucky - something I wish would happen to me or anyone here who gets slapped with charges more often than not, if I may add.

And yes, back to the topic of the thread at hand.

So I don't know how I didn't know about this, but mora.jp sells most of Scandal's releases in hi-res formats ranging up to 96khz/24bit. I don't know if this is new or if it's been going on forever and I just didn't know about it... I do know that when we were talking about Honey here back in 2018, there was discussion of this and nobody seemed to know about any existing hi-res version at that time.

I don't have all of them yet but I've listened to a few songs and also analyzed them in Audacity and I've only found very slight differences vs. the corresponding CD track. I'm not sure if it's worth getting them all or if some are better than others.

Has anybody else tried these? Some of them are marked as coming from a hi-res source and others not (the older releases are not); I figure it's only really even worth trying the ones from a hi-res source, since otherwise you're just wasting money and file size on the same recording you probably already have. But from the few hi-res source tracks I've looked at/listened to so far, it still seems like it's the same master and that master was made for CD. So there's nothing really above 22khz and it's still brickwalled. There does seem to be a *little* more bass in the spectrogram of the tracks I've looked at, though, and I do feel like I can hear that with headphones too. (That said, some of their later songs are super-boomy already and I haven't gotten any of those in hi-res form yet; hopefully those *don't* have more bass.)

I guess my point in writing this is twofold; first to try to find out for myself if anyone else has these and can tell me if it's worth getting them all, and second to let anyone else who doesn't know they exist that they do in fact exist. I didn't find anyone talking about them anywhere either now or in the past. So those of us Scandal fans who do care about sound, these releases are probably the best option currently available, even though so far my experience is that they're a little disappointing vs. what they could have done with them.

You do have to jump through some hoops to buy from mora.jp from outside Japan, but it's possible and there are tutorials online.

The older Sony releases definitely sound better to me in Hi-Res and yes these releases were on sale ages ago on mora etc.

Post Sony releases, the sound engineers/mixers have changed it seems and the music has gotten a lot louder, and yes I have noticed this, yes I also put the music through audiocity to take a look at he levels and peaks too. I posted this on reddit(maybe) and twitter before.

I'm using a A&K DAP with balanced cabled CIEM and some of the new mixes sound rather harsh because of the loudness. I also have some balanced monitor speaker via PC with external DAC. Basically I listen to Hi-Res version rather than the FLAC/CD releases.

So yes there are some benefits of listening in Hi-Res if you have the equipment and most importantly good hearing

So for the older releases I say go to it, but for the newer releases your mileage may vary.

wildthing wrote:
So for the older releases I say go to it, but for the newer releases your mileage may vary.

The older releases are the ones *not* listed as coming from a hi-res source, though - they're still better? I feel like the CD's up to about the Queens are Trumps era already sound pretty good, so I wasn't sure how much better a hi-res recording from the same non-hi-res source could sound, and if it'd be worth it.

You're saying the hi-res versions of the older stuff without hi-res sources are more of an improvement than the hi-res versions of the newer stuff with hi-res sources?

Do you specifically have Honey? That's the one I'm most wondering about, if there's really any improvement vs. the CD. I just have Standard right now since it's my favorite album of theirs even though some of the sounds on it are pretty harsh. It sounds a tiny bit better in hi-res but it's hard to tell unless I do a direct A/B comparison (which I've done). I was really hoping that as the quality of their CD recordings seemed to go down over time, the relative quality of these hi-res releases would go up in comparison.

Yes the older release tend to have a wider dynamic range and so are less compressed dynamically.

Honey was never released in Hi-Res, its also rather loud, so probably why a Hi-res version would not have given much improvement. (see current releases below)

Its hard to do a A/B comparison for some releases, I've had other Hi-res releases where the CD/FLAC and Hi-Res version sounds so different, so the sound engineer obviously mixed it very differently. I mean just like Apple's "Apple Digital Masters" remaster can sound different to other FLAC services/CDs, depending on how they had remixed it from the master, its almost like pixel peeping now

BTW are Scandal songs on Tidal? MQA that's another whole mix as well LOL....

There have been master tapes from other artists and it was 64bit 352khz recording, but it must be rare.

Taking of sound quality, Japan music DVD/Blu-ray also tend to use lossless PCM audio too, so wondering if its to do with licensing or mastering process, TV unless its a movie, they also pretty much stopped doing 5.1 AAC broadcast on TV for music shows like Kohaku for probably the same reason.

Here are the current mora Hi-Res releases:

Sorry, I could have sworn I saw Honey there when I looked but I was probably looking at the main list, not the hi-res only list. Well, that's disappointing. I know the CD is super-loud; I was hoping that for the mythical hi-res version they had cut it back a little bit. I feel like the mastering on that CD was almost just a mistake. It's crazy if it was on purpose, and I've been searching for a better version of it ever since. Somewhere the original pre-master files for that album exist and it doesn't seem like it would be difficult to just re-export it with different settings. I mean it's not like the old days where you're dealing with physical tapes and analog knobs and dials and then pressing to actual media. It's a lot easier now and costs basically nothing. So I keep hoping it happens, and obviously hallucinated it being in the Mora list as a result

I don't have Tidal and it doesn't look like the web site lets me search without an account but I did a Google search and the only Scandal that comes up with Tidal is the American band. So I don't think they're on there...

This may be good news for the British fans. My order from CD Japan came to the door today, I did not have to go down to post office and pay custom tax.

This trade deal with Japan and Britain could be on to good thing. 

@Andy666

Wow, that is excellent news !

Andy666 wrote:This may be good news for the British fans. My order from CD Japan came to the door today, I did not have to go down to post office and pay custom tax.

This trade deal with Japan and Britain could be on to good thing. 

Either it’s the trade deal, or:

1. your stuff was less than GBP18, or
2. you were lucky

I say this because I don’t think the UK is anything like the US yet from reading this https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-japan-agree-historic-free-trade-agreement

Of course I’ll be happy if you are right, though - I like buying guitars from Japan. And I better stop now as this is so out of topic...

The CD cost more than £18, so either it the trade deal or I got lucky. Maybe some nice worker at CD Japan did me a favour.

Since my next order is Scandal CD Maxi,  I will have to wait I see happens, but my order cost less than £10.