I watched this documentary on PBS and was so enthralled with it I ordered it. I am a teacher and one of the classes I teach is "The History of Popular Music" and another is 'Beginner Piano.' I showed this documentary to students in both classes.

As a (music) history teacher I feel it is important for students to appreciate the roots of music history. It is also a great way for students to be exposed to music legends.

As a piano teacher I was very impressed with Billy Joel's playing of "Root Beer Rag." I have never heard it before and watching him play it on the piano was equally impressive. I wanted my piano students to see how fast his hands played as well as hear the music.

I bought this last night and I am very disappointed with the sound.

I am not a snob. I am just reporting what I heard after playing this new "Stranger" CD set. My volume level is closed to zero or minimum and the sound that I am hearing is already loud. The midrange and upper midrange are shrill and very fatiguing too.

ps.
Keep your remastered Billy Joel CD's.

This is very bad news for people who love good sound.
If we continue to patronize this 'loud and modern' remastering and then the recording company achieved the sales that they have targeted, there is a great possibility that they will give the same (bad) remastering treatment to any future re-issues.
Expect to hear more releases like this in the future.

There's no mention of the remastering engineer in the Deluxe re-issue liner notes.
It just says "the original album was mastered by Ted Jensen."
To me that information is useless.
The buyers are more interested to know who did the remastering for the re-issue and not the mastering credit for the original album.
Those are two different things.
Maybe it was remastered by a new college graduate son of a Sony record executive and that explain why the sound is so loud and annoying and there's no remastering credit.

Nowadays, you cannot return an open CD anymore. The only way to dispose it is to re-sell it to music stores that do buy-and-sell for $5 cash or store credit. Now I will be losing at least $25.
My theory is that Sony has intentionally made it sound loud and shrill to attract a much bigger portion of the population. I am referring to those people who don't have stereo system in their homes and to those who only listen to music through their boomy car stereo.
Of course, profit is more important to them than satisfying the ears of the small audiophile niche.

Thank goodness that we still have the remastered CD's and vinyl records.

I haven't heard the SACD yet but I hope that it's not another example of 'modern' remastering.