More of the Music of Steely Dan
- With superb Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Warner Bros. pressing
- Punchy and high-resolution, check out the cymbals and muted guitar on “I.G.Y.” — they sound pretty much right on the money here
- Big, open and spacious with virtually no smear, this copy is doing just about everything we want it to
- The sound may be too heavily processed and glossy for some, but we find that on the best copies that sound works about as well as any for this album
- 4 1/2 stars: “A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date.”
- We played the Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing not long ago — I hope to god no one reading this blog thought it was anything better than passable
- Of course the Mobile Fidelity Half-Speed pressing is not right either — it has the sloppy bass and boosted top end that almost all of their records have, perfect for the stereo systems of the 80s but not a good fit for the best of what came after
Energetic and present, this copy is on a completely different level than most pressings. We just finished a big shootout for Donald Fagen’s solo effort from 1982 (just two years after Gaucho and the end of Steely Dan) and we gotta tell you, there are a lot of weak-sounding copies out there. We should know; we played them.
We’ve been picking copies up for more than a year in the hopes that we’d have some killer Hot Stamper copies to offer, but most of them left us cold. Flat, edgy and bright, like a bad copy of Graceland, only a fraction had the kind of magic we find on the better Steely Dan albums.
Both sides here are incredibly clear and high-rez compared to most pressings, with none of the veiled, smeary quality we hear so often. The vocals are breathy, the bass is clear and the whole thing is open and spacious.
How Analog Is It?
The ones we like the best will tend to be the ones that sound the most Analog. The more they sound like the average pressing — in other words, the more CD-like they sound — the lower the sonic grade. Many will not have even one Hot Stamper side and will end up in the trade-in pile.
The best copies sound the way the best copies of most Classic Rock records sound: tonally correct, rich, clear, sweet, smooth, open, present, lively, big, spacious, Tubey Magical, with breathy vocals and little to no spit, grit, grain or grunge.
That’s the sound of analog, and the best copies of The Nightfly have that sound.
This vintage Warner Brothers 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 The Nightfly 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 even as late as 1982
- 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.
The upper mids on certain tracks of both sides have a tendency to be brighter than we would like. “Ruby Baby” on side one can be that way, and the title track on side two has some of the wannabe hit single radio EQ that makes it the ‘least likely to succeed’ so to speak. On a good copy the first track of each side should be all you need to hear.
What We’re Listening For On The Nightfly
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
More Conventional Wisdom
All the tracks are digitally recorded, mixed and mastered, proving again that the conventional wisdom is simply mistaken. Conventional wisdom is a term of disparagement here at Better Records for this very reason. What passes for common sense in the world of audiophile record collectors is mostly of dubious value, if not demonstrably false. We refer to many of them as Record Myths and lay out the evidence against them in our listings. (I believe we are alone in the world of record dealers to do so. That’s a much bigger world but it’s full of the same misunderstandings and misinformation.)
If there are “myths” on the list that you yourself believe to be true, we are happy to send you the record that will help disabuse you of such notions. Rarely is there a time when we do not have the record in hand that makes our case, and it would be our pleasure to have you hear just what we are talking about for yourself, on your own system.
Side One
I.G.Y.
Green Flower Street
Ruby Baby
Maxine
Side Two
New Frontier
The Nightfly
The Goodbye Look
Walk Between Raindrops
AMG Review
A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date.