Top Artists – Steely Dan & Donald Fagen Solos

Steely Dan – Gaucho

More Steely Dan

  • This copy is guaranteed to handily beat any pressing of Gaucho you have ever played, especially the awful Ron McMaster Heavy Vinyl
  • This superb pressing has three-dimensional ambience, tubey richness, you-are-there immediacy, tight bass, clear guitar transients, silky highs, and truckloads of analog magic on every track
  • 4 stars in the AMG, 4 1/2 in Rolling Stone, and one of this exceptionally well recorded band’s Three Best Sounding Albums – a true Must Own
  • “Despite its coolness, the music is quite beautiful. With its crystalline keyboard textures and diaphanous group vocals, ”Gaucho” contains the sweetest music Steely Dan has ever made.” New York Times
  • The sound may be too heavily processed and glossy for some, but we find that on the best copies that sound works fine for this sophisticated music
  • If you’re a Steely Dan fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1980 is surely a Must Own

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Letter of the Week – “I just figured this was just a bad recording…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

This week’s letter is from our good friend Roger, who, like us, is a GIANT Steely Dan fan. Apparently he had tried every copy of Katy Lied he could get his hands on and practically had given up on the album — until he decided to shell out the princely sum of Three Hundred Clams ($300, probably not the last piaster he could borrow, but a pretty hefty chunk of dough for a fairly common used LP from 1975) to Better Records, with the hope that we might actually find a way to put him in touch with the real Dr. Wu.

Let’s just say it seems that Roger got his money’s worth — and maybe a little more.

The title of his letter is: 

Katy Lied? Are you sure?

I tried your Hot Stamper Steely Dan Katy Lied. You gotta be kidding me. Are you sure this is the same recording? I remember your saying that this one is your favorite SD record and I could never understand why, at least until I heard this secret recording. Other than the HS copy you basically had a choice between the dull and lifeless bland US pressing, or the Mobile Fidelity version, which has those indescribable phasey, disembodied instruments and voices that sound unmusical to me.

I even tried British and Japanese pressings with no luck. I just figured this was just a bad recording, which made sense in light of all the press about the problems during the recording and mixing sessions, and I don’t think I bothered to listen to it again for at least the past 5 years.

But wow, this is clearly in another league. The voices and instruments are in three dimensions, the bass and dynamics are far far better, the saxes are up-front and breathy. I couldn’t believe how good Daddy Don’t Live in that New York City No More and Chain Lightning sounded. Even my subwoofer that I roll off at 30Hz got a good workout. It sounds like live music. So how did you sneak your tape recorder into the studio sessions, anyway?

Roger, we’re so happy to know that your love for Katy Lied has finally been requited after all these years. The reason we go on for days about the sound of practically every track on the album is that we love it just as much as you do.

We struggled ourselves from one bad pressing to another. Eventually, with better cleaning fluids, better equipment and tons of pressings at our disposal, we broke through the Bad ABC Pressing Barrier and discovered the copies that had the real Katy Lied Magic.

We Are Heartened

Everything you said was true. We are especially heartened by the fact that you cited Chain Lightning as a high point of the album we sent you. Your copy, earning a grade of A+ for side two, was a couple of steps down from the best — but it still sounds great! You don’t have to buy the Ultimate Copy to get sound that beats the pants off any “audiophile” pressing, any import, any anything, man.

It’s Not About The Money

You and I both know it’s not about the three hundred bucks. It’s about some of the best music these guys ever made. It’s about their ambitious yet problem-plagued recording surviving the record label’s mass-production-on-the-cheap, opting to stamp the sound on a slice of not-particularly-good vinyl. It’s about the search for that rare pressing with the kind of sound that conveys the richness and sophistication of Becker and Fagen’s music, music that I’ve been listening to since 1975 and do not expect to tire of any time soon (so far so good: as of 2013 this is still my favorite Dan album). [Still true as of 2022.]

So what if it took thirty years to finally get hold of a good one? With a little luck we’ll both be listening to this album for another thirty years, and that works out to the very un-princely sum of ten bucks a year.

I wish I could have sneaked a tape recorder into the studio. I sure wouldn’t have gone in for that crazy DBX Noise Reduction system they used. That alone would have saved us all a decade or two of suffering (unless you like the sound of two trash can lids crashing into each other).

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Letter of the Week – “This is the best sounding LP I have ever heard…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our newest Hot Stamper converts, John R., a customer only since February [of who knows what year, 2010 perhaps?], has already managed to acquire about a dozen of our best Hot Stamper LPs to the tune of many thousands of dollars.

As we like to say, the best copies may not be cheap, but here at Better Records you most certainly get what you pay for. Just ask John. If I read him right what he got for his 650 clams was something that exceeded any expectation he might have had for it.

Who knew? How would anyone know this album could sound so this good? The average copy barely hints at the sound the engineers recorded.

Anyway, that’s our story. Now here’s John’s.

Tom,

This is the best sounding LP I have ever heard including all the ones I have bought from you or ever heard in my life at a show etc. Holy Shit! This is a GREAT LP – sound and music. I must confess, I never heard this LP before – even once. I did recognize the lead song though having heard it on the radio several times. MY GOD! I listened to it twice over both sides. This is fantastic. The music slayed me.

I took Tom’s advice and played it real loud. Once I turned it up hard – well it got even better and better and better. Wow! You can’t have this one back. Every single song on both sides is a winner. I especially got a kick out of the last song on side one – which is an old fashioned instrumental that got me jumping all over the place.

One of the great things about doing business with you guys is that you know and love your music. This means I get good advice and direction about what LPs are great music and about the performers. This means I can get great stuff that not only I know I love but stuff I don’t know yet that I will love. Wow – there just is no way to be able to buy that. No way at all. Thanks so very much. Please tell Tom that I am really happy with this LP. Katy Lied now has to be on my short list to get soon.

I think I jumped on another good one tonight. I also am not familiar with this LP or this group Return to Forever. But the description had me salivating to listen to it. (more…)

“What I’m all about is saving the world from bad sound.”

Check Out Some of Our Reviews (and Those of Our Customers’) for Albums on the Analogue Productions Label

Saving the world from bad sound you say? Hey, that’s what I’m about too!

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it, laying out, often in great detail, exactly what’s wrong with these new Heavy Vinyl records being put out by the likes of Mobile Fidelity and Analogue Productions.

We have over 250 listings for them right here on the blog. Are there some good ones I missed?

Apparently the writer for the Times thinks there are, although some of the ones he mentions do not do much for his credibility. (Aja comes to mind, made from a copy tape — Chad goes that extra mile all right! To see what Sisario has to say about the album, with our take as well, just scroll to the bottom of this commentary.)

Let’s see what Sisario has to say about the man from Kansas and his vinyl empire.

An article about Chad Kassem and Analogue Productions has just come out, written by Ben Sisario for The New York Times.

Sisario is the guy who was as enamored with Pete Hutchison of the Electric Recording Company as he seems to be of the fellow you see pictured, a man who he has no trouble calling “The Wizard of Vinyl,” and with a straight face as far as I can tell.

Audiophiles in my experience tend to be credulous — I should know, I was as credulous as they come about everything audio back in my twenties and thirties — but it seems that writers for The New York Times will believe almost anything somebody tells them about records. (Perhaps Sisario will be taken to task in the comments section, but I’m sure not going to waste my time trying to find out.)

I would love to have him come to Westlake so we could play him some of the albums he seems to think are so great. That would be one helluva wake-up call. Not only would he have to retract this article, he would have to retract the one about Hutchison. That would be a win win in my book!

Some quotes you may find interesting, or, if you are like me, congenitally of a more skeptical bent, absurd. At the very least, let’s just say unfounded.

Chad Kassem is on a mission — saving listeners “from bad sound” — at the rural factory where he pores over LPs from some of music’s most important artists.”

One record on the QRP production line was “Fragile,” the 1971 prog-rock favorite by Yes, in a two-disc, 45-r.p.m. edition that sells for $60, as part of a series marking the 75th anniversary of Atlantic Records. It is Analogue Productions’ third iteration of that album in two decades, while Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, another reissue label, made a two-disc version as recently as 2019, and Rhino, Atlantic’s corporate cousin, offers its own “Fragile” vinyl. Labels know the value in feeding collectors’ endless hunt for the white whale.

“The fact that we can still beat some of the earliest, original pressings,” said Craig Kallman, a top Atlantic executive, “was the idea behind the Chad partnership.”

This is not a fact by any definition of the word that I am familiar with.  It is at best a claim, and one we had no trouble refuting when we played the flat-as-a-pancake Fragile that Rhino put out under his auspices. Maybe the new one is better. But how can you trust anyone that would put out anything as bad as that Fragile?

“I’m doing what I love for a living,” he added. “I mean, what’s more satisfying than picking your favorite childhood record, getting the master tape and getting it to sound better than it’s ever sounded before? What’s better than that?”

That would indeed be awesome if someone could do it. We know of only a couple of modern remasterings that can claim superior sound when played up against the best vintage pressings we have auditioned. You can read about one of them here. And no, it is not mastered by any engineer mentioned on any audiophile site or forum. Nobody knows who it is, not even us!

On another note, in the same article about Chad, Mobile Fidelity defends their use of digital, which strikes me as a reasonable defense as far as it goes:

In a statement, a spokesman for Mobile Fidelity defended its process, and said that its digital step (now disclosed) offers various advantages: “For example, we can endlessly tweak it for levels, alignments and adjustments. None of this is possible with original analog master tapes, whose fragile condition subjects them to potential damage with each pass. Our approach represents the best of all worlds — and allows us to continue our role as historical caretakers that safeguard, preserve and respect the irreplaceable original.”

A fellow who goes by DC Moderate wrote in to say he doubted these records are being made with an all-analog chain.

I’m a member of a Facebook group that debates these issues. Two bald-faced assertions have been made by some of the members of that group, and I welcome a reply either from Kassem or from Ben Sisario.

The first is that Kassem, Bernie Grundman and Kevin Gray do not, in fact, have access to the “original master tapes,” as these are locked away in vaults by the record companies. I’m not sure how a rebuttal could be made to such an assertion, as it is the equivalent of being asked “when will you stop beating your wife?” My response has always been that both Gray and Kassem have posted photos of the original master tapes that they utilize. What more can they say?

The second is based upon various posts on You Tube that argue that ALL of these analog mastering studios have digital equipment, and at some point in the mastering process, ALL so-called AAA records are converted to digital. Sisario’s article doesn’t explicitly respond to that allegation, and I therefore welcome a response from Sisario or Kassem. Although implicitly, Sisario and Kassem are already saying that the entire chain is analog.

Ben Sisario replies:

I can’t comment on the practices of Bernie Grundman or Kevin Gray, although I’ve spoken to both of them and they are some of the most esteemed engineers in the industry. And it’s true that some labels don’t let tapes out of the vaults. But I saw with my own eyes that Analogue Productions has access to real masters, and I witnessed their mastering setup in use; they have the old console of Doug Sax, another of the greats.

I can’t comment on the second “allegation.” But I would note that after the Mobile Fidelity fiasco a few years ago, you now see other labels being a bit more specific and clear in how they describe their sources and mastering.

Analog Shmanalog

Now it’s my turn. The following is my reply to the friend who sent me the NYT article. He had been to my studio and heard for himself the sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that “The Wizard of Vinyl” produces. Up against properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LPs, they are at best mediocre, and more often than not just plain terrible. (Aja is a good example of a cross between mediocre and terrible, see below.)

This “pure analog versus analog tainted with digital” debate needs to stop.

It completely avoids the only question worth asking: are these new records any good?

Who cares how they make them?

Only the deaf! Those who can hear know how badly they suck and could not care less.

You sat me down and we played records. They all failed.

That is the only true test.

Put all of these new records to the same test! Please, somebody!

Somebody with a top quality system can volunteer to do shootouts for any and all of them and let the chips fall where they may.

Finding such a system may be impossible, but we can at least try. This is getting us nowhere.

There is no testing going on, just claims being made with nothing to back them up.

None of this matters. Literally, none of it.

Of course, we at Better Records could volunteer to do it, publicly, with blindfolded listeners under controlled conditions.

But we need to make money and there is no money in bashing crap vinyl.

We play a few from time to time and I post the notes from the shootout on this blog, mostly as a public service.

If you have a good stereo, properly set up in a good room, you should know by now not to buy this crap. Everybody else is falling for this man’s fool’s gold and there is nothing any of us who know better can do about it.

TP

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The Nightfly on Heavy Vinyl – Rhino Plays Us All for Suckers Once Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now

We just finished a big shootout for The Nightfly, our first in nearly three years. There is a Hot Stamper pressing on the site as I write these words.

Since we do shootouts throughout the day on four out of the five days of the work week (the fifth is devoted to shopping for records locally by our main listening guy, Riley), there is nothing special about any of that.

It takes us about three years to find enough clean copies of an album like The Nightfly to get a shootout going these days, a marked depature from earlier in the 21st century when common domestic pressings were everywhere, and usually for cheap. Those days are gone and we will never see their like again.

These days we find a lot of Heavy Vinyl pressings mixed in with the vintage stuff we buy, and if the price is right, sometimes we pick up a copy of whatever album we plan to shootout down the road.

In this case it turned out to be the 2021 Rhino remaster on Heavy German vinyl, mastered by Chris Bellman. Or was it?

We of course found it to be awful, as we so often do with Mr. Bellman’s records. It’s lean and recessed. Over the 42 years I have been playing the original Robert Ludwig pressings of the album, I have heard some that sounded that way. I wrote about it many years ago, trying to make the point that when you hear a copy that sounds lean and bright like a CD, what you are hearing is a bad pressing.

The good ones are not like that. They are rich and smooth and even, gulp, kind of analog sounding.

Glossy and artificial, sure, and much too heavily-processed for my taste, but I can live with that sound, even though it’s hardly my idea of hi-fidelity.

Hold Your Horses

Somebody pulled a fast one it appears, as the pressings without the initials CB in the dead wax are not cut by him, even though he is credited on discogs and one assumes on the jacket or inner sleeve as well. The copy we played had no CB in the dead wax.

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Listening In Depth to Gaucho, The Band’s Last Good Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Gaucho.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

Of all the great albums Steely Dan made, and that means their seven original albums and nothing that came after, there are only three in our opinion that actually support their reputation as studio wizards and recording geniuses.

Chronologically they are Pretzel Logic, Aja, and Gaucho. Every sound captured on these albums is so carefully crafted and considered that it practically brings one to tears to contemplate what the defective DBX noise reduction system did to the work of genius that is Katy Lied, their best album and the worst sounding. (Those cymbal crashes can really mess with your mind if you let them. To get a better picture of the DBX sound, just bang two trash can lids together as close to your head as possible.)

The first two albums can sound very good, as can Royal Scam, but none of those can compete with The Big Three mentioned above for sonics. A Hot Stamper copy of any of them would be a seriously good sounding record indeed.

Side One

Babylon Sisters

The tom intro is a great test for transparency. On most copies those opening drums are flat and lackluster. When it’s done right, you can hear the room around the drums, and that’s a mighty fine sounding room!

Also, pay attention to the bell in the left channel at the beginning of the song – if it’s sharp and doesn’t really sustain, you’re probably dealing with the typical extension-challenged copy. If it’s shimmery with a natural sounding decay you may very well be in store for some great sound.

On most copies the saxophone that intermittently pokes its head out will get smoothed over, losing its bite and getting lost in the mix. Much the same can be said for the background singers — they can easily sound veiled and get lost in the mix.

From the time they start singing “Babylon sisters” until they reach the final “shake it!” there should be a crescendo of volume and intensity.

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Letter of the Week – “Can only say that I now can enjoy three examples of my favourite music in a way that I have never experienced before.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased last year. (We are very far behind in posting your letters, trying to catch up.)

Hello Tom,

After your extensive explanations preceding my first purchase at Better Records, I would like to share my experience with the three records that have bought.

[Peter went on to describe the conidtion issues with our records and wanted us to know they were not as quiet as he was led to believe. We did our usual song and dance about old records and such, which apparently satisfied him as he has spent a great deal of money with us since then.]

The sound ratings. Here, I am fully convinced. All three records have fantastic sound, in all respects. I could try to describe what I am hearing, but you have already done that very eloquently in the explanation on you site. I really have nothing to add (or to deduct)

Can only say that I now can enjoy three examples of my favourite music in a way that I have never experienced before.

That is not completely true: I already own a pressing from “Gaucho” from the same series as your copy – it sounded way better than the European pressing that I also have. This made me believe that there ”might be something going on.”

However, be reassured: my copy of the RL mastered Gaucho is quite good but yours is better still!

A big thumbs-up to your ears and your hard work!

Due to financial constraints, I only bought “super hot” pressings – which in my opinion are already great sounding. I find it hard to believe that, apparently, there are also “white hot pressings” in existence …

The Cisco Aja

We also discussed the disappointing quality of the modern 180 gram reissues. For example: after the Gaucho I listened again to my Cisco reissue of “Aja.” In comparison, it sounds flat, dull, with muffled instruments, little soundstage depth and only half of the soundstage between my speakers occupied.

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Listening in Depth to Katy Lied

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

As a huge Steely Dan fan starting with their second album, Countdown to Ecstasy, in 1975 I went right down to my local Tower Records and bought Katy Lied as soon as it came out. It has been a personal favorite since the day I first played it.

Much like our longstanding customer Roger, when the album didn’t sound all that good to me, I just assumed it was a bad recording. 35 years of hard work and perseverance later, I was finally able to hear the album in all its glory.

It’s only fitting that it’s a member of our extensive listening in depth series.

Any record we get obsessed with tends to get played hundreds and hundreds of times. Knowing the record as well as we do makes it easy to recognize what to listen for in order to separate the best copies from the merely good ones.

And of course, as a card carrying audiophile, I had to buy the MoFi pressing when it came out a few years later. A company that would release a record with sound that bad should have gone out of business a long time ago. For some reason they are still in business, a fact that does not reflect well on the audiophile community.

The Key

The trick with Katy Lied Is to find the right balance between richness, sweetness and clarity.

Take three or four Katy Lied pressings, clean them up and play just one or two of the tracks we discuss below. On a highly resolving system, you shouldn’t be able to find any two copies that get those tracks to sound the same. We used to do our shootouts with up to a dozen copies at a time — now more like 6-8 since we can’t find that many clean copies anymore — and no two sound the same to us.

Side One

Black Friday

Arguably the most musically aggressive track on the album, “Black Friday” is without question the most sonically aggressive and a quick indicator of what you can expect from the rest of the side. The typical copy is an overly-compressed sonic assault on the ears. The glaring upper midrange and tizzy grit that passes for highs will have you jumping out of your easy chair to turn down the volume. Even my younger employees who grew up playing in loud punk rock bands were cringing at the sound.

However, the good copies take this aggressive energy and turn it into pure excitement. The boys are ready to rock, and they’ve got the pulsing bass, hammering drums, and screaming guitars to do it.

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Steely Dan / Katy Lied – Our Favorite Dan Album of Them All

More Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Katy Lied

  • A Katy Lied like you’ve never heard, with excellent Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • Our pick for the best Dan album of them all, a masterpiece of Jazzy Swing Pop that is sure to reward hundreds of plays in the decades to come
  • Take it from The Dan: “The sound created by musicians and singers is reproduced as faithfully as possible, and special care is taken to preserve the band-width and transient response of each performance.”
  • Special care may have been taken, but the DBX system put an end to any hope that the “transient response” would be preserved
  • For that, you will have to wait for next Steely Dan album to come out, The Royal Scam – it’s got transient response up the ying-yang
  • 5 stars: “Each song is given a glossy sheen, one that accentuates not only the stronger pop hooks, but also the precise technical skill of the professional musicians drafted to play the solos.”
  • This is a Must Own title from 1975, which, incidentally, turned out to be a great year for rock and pop music

The covers for these original Katy Lied pressings on ABC always have at least some edge, seam or ringwear. We will of course do our best to find you a cover with the fewest problems, but none of them will be perfect, or even all that close to it. It is by far the hardest Steely Dan album to find good covers for.

This copy has the all-important rock energy we look for, although rocking is not quite what Steely Dan are up to here. Cameron Crowe calls it “…absolutely impeccable swing-pop”, a four word description that gets to the heart of the music far better than any combination of adjectives and nouns containing the word “rock.” (more…)

Letter of the Week – “After playing a few very smooth and quiet bands I put on my excellent vintage copy of Aja that proceeded to destroy the Cisco.”

More of the Music of Steely Dan

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (bolding added):

Hey Tom,   

It’s amusing that even Golden Ears who have the attention of large readerships can miss and misunderstand so much. You don’t have to understand the technical why of the variability of LPs to appreciate just how profound the audible differences can be from stamper to stamper. Even in acknowledging that differences are present, they do not seem to appreciate the extreme degree of the variation in sound among LPs from different stampers.

As so many of us have learned from you, a “hot stamper” LP is simply in a whole different league in sound quality. A good sound system is necessary to realize just how big that difference is and the more optimized that system is the better.

Beyond the audible reality and the technical issues, it is the subject of value that is not understood or appreciated. The ability to simply find a nice playable copy of a vintage LP is a major task. So many LPs have suffered the gouging of what must have been a rusty nail used as a stylus as well as all the other sins that can be wreaked on the plastic disc. Then the incredible task of assembling enough different copies to be able to do the “shoot-out” would seem impossible.

I have, as many now may have tried, done a simple “shoot-out” of a few copies of a favorite LP. Among those I have always found the “better” of the bunch. Now and then and just by luck (since the statistics of not having enough samples was not working in my favor) I have found what must indeed be a “hot stamper). And WOW …..what a difference!

The number of times this has occurred fits on less than one hand yet when you hear an LP that has been mixed and mastered really well and then “transferred” with care and quality via an excellent stamper, there is an epiphany. Suddenly you hear what you often refer to as “master tape” sound. As I have said before, this is really a sad statement about the quality and consistency of record production throughout its history.

The “Audiophile” Half-Speed thing only piles it on top of this with the way mastering at half speed seems to extract the dynamic life and frequency response from an album in contrast to a standard copy.

The logical intention that mastering at half speed would allow the cutting lathe tool to have “more time” to lay down more of the music signal just never really worked.

You would think the “Golden Ears” that developed this idea would have compared the result with real-time cutting speed (not brain surgery). I never wanted all this to be the way it is and didn’t even know it until I stumbled upon Better Records one day. But it is the way it is!

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