Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

We heard some amazing sound coming from the grooves of 52nd Street, but let's give credit where credit is due -- the recording and mastering engineers involved with this album. Jim Boyer and Ted Jensen can both take great pride in the superb work they have done here.

This vintage Columbia pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of 52nd Street Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Billy Joel's Best

The best pressings of this album sound much better than we ever imagined they would. That being the case, we have to give it top sonic honors in the Billy Joel canon.

It's certainly a step-up in class over The Stranger and Songs in the Attic. If there's another Billy Joel album that sounds as good, I'll believe it when I hear it.

On the better copies of the album, the sound of the piano was solid, full-bodied, with both weight and warmth, just like the real thing. The copies of the album with a piano that sounded lean or hard always ended up having problems with the other instruments as well. (This should not be surprising; the piano was designed to be the single instrument most capable of reproducing the sound of an entire orchestra.)

What To Listen For On 52nd Street

This copy has the kind of sound we look for in a top quality Billy Joel record. A few qualities to listen for:

• Immediacy in the vocals (so many copies are veiled and distant)
• Natural tonal balance (most copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; ones with the right balance are the exception, not the rule)
• Good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful)
• Spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space)
• And last but not least, transparency -- the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this simple but sophisticated recording

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Not So Rare

We rarely do a shootout with less than a dozen copies of a fairly common title such as this. Let's face it, this is not a rare record. In fact, we often open sealed copies for such shootouts in hopes of finding top copies with quiet vinyl. We crack them open, clean them up and start dropping the needle on them one by one. In the case of Billy Joel's records, not a single one played better than Mint Minus Minus! That's Columbia vinyl for you.

The Tracklist tab above will take you to a select song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What to Listen For advice.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found .

A Must Own Pop Record

We consider this Billy Joel album his . It's a recording that should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found .