Top Producers – Gary Katz

Steely Dan – Aja

More Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Aja

  • Killer sound for Steely Dan’s magnificent Jazzy Pop breakthrough album, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Punchy, full and smooth, with the kind of rhythmic energy that brings out the jazzy funk in the music
  • A Better Records rock and pop Top 100 album and a true Demo Disc on a pressing that sounds as good as this one does
  • If I were to make a list of my favorite rock and pop albums of 1977, this album would definitely be right at the top
  • Considering how dismal the releases by Cisco Music and Mobile Fidelity were, it seems that no one outside of Bernie Grundman has managed to get Aja sounding right on vinyl, and that was 47 years ago
  • The sound is as heavily processed, artificial and overly glossy as practically anything produced in the 70s, which means that its Mid-Fi appeal is all but assured
  • For those of you on the Higher Fidelity end of the spectrum, our best Hot Stampers get everything sounding as right, balanced and natural as Aja can possibly sound
  • Unfortunately for those of you who don’t like paying our prices or doing your own shootouts, Bernie’s new UHQR leaves a lot to be desired. With mediocre-to-bad sound on all four of its sides and a price tag of $150, what else can you call it but another Analogue Productions rip-off?

Folks, there’s not much I can tell you about this copy of Aja that’s going to make you want this record, other than to say this: If you’re in the market for a superb pressing of what’s gotta be the most beloved Steely Dan record they made, look no further. It’s right here. (more…)

Steely Dan’s Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Steely Dan

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s look at the facts. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustable supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the substantial amounts of both time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

We hope that at least some fraction of the audiophile public who own these titles will be able to hear for themselves the shortomings we have described and begin to consider the possibility that there might be another way.

That other way can be found in the bins of their local record stores or, for those with deeper pockets, on our site.

Either way, settling for the kind of sound found on these modern reissues is the one choice no one should be making. Especially in the case of this awful UHQR. For $150 no less. Our transcribed notes follow:

Side One – Black Cow

Very veiled vocals and snare.

Size and tonality aren’t far off.

Odd bass. A bit thick or “slow” feeling.

The hook isn’t very dynamic.

Gets hot and crunchy.

Side Three, Track One – Peg

Ugly snare and hi-hat.

Big and rich intro like the good ones then falls apart.

Flat and dry vocals.

Bluberry Half-Speed bass

Grade this side: 1+

Side Three, Track Two – Home at Last

Really hear the issues here.

Compressed, hard, flat.

Smeary hi-hat.

Summing Up the Sound

Size and tonality aren’t far off for tracks like Black Cow and Peg.

The sound is kind of rich but the mids are pretty flat and dead.

Really lacking the transparency, presence and breath in the vocals.

Lacking dynamics too.

Peaks get compressed and gritty.

Songs like Home at Last really suffer.

It’s hard, recessed and messy.

Final grades

Black Cow and Peg: 1+

Home at Last: NFG

We do not sell records with sound so mediocre that they have only earned a sonic grade of 1+.

As for NFG, what is there to say?

Note that in our review for the Cisco, Home at Last was the track with the most obvious problems there too. We said it was “the toughest song to get right on side two.”

From our point of view, it’s clear that the Bernie Grundman of 1977, age 34, had the skills and the equipment to knock Home at Last right out of the park. Contrast that with the record the Bernie Grundman of today has produced, at the age of 80, with different equipment (my money is on much worse equipment) and who knows what remaining skills.

Yes, it’s unfortunate he was stuck with a dub tape — those are the breaks — but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he made a right mess of Home at Last, a different mess but not a better mess than Kevin Gray made using whatever crappy dub tape he was stuck with.

A sad state of affairs for the audiophiles who love Steely Dan and Heavy Vinyl. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both, not with Chad calling the shots and Bernie doing his bidding.

What’s Up with Chad?

Speaking of the Bernie Grundman-Chad Kassem connection, we reproduce below the hopelessly mistaken advice we gave Chad after having played his not-that-terrible Can’t Buy a Thrill UHQR:

He used to like super-fat and tubey jazz records, and he hired Doug Sax to make some of those for him. For a while he liked MoFi-like records, and he hired Stan Ricker to make some of those for him. He hired Kevin Gray to make mediocrities like Quiet Kenny (review coming, but you can watch the Washington Post video to get the idea), and he hired George Marino to make a mess of Tea for the Tillerman.

If he’s hiring the best, as he likes to say he is, why all the second-rate and third-rate and just plain awful sounding records?

Our advice: Chad should fire all the other engineers he’s been hiring lately and just work with Bernie from now on. (The guy who cut this record should definitely not be rehired. When’s the last time he mastered a record that’s any better than passable?)

We give up. There is no hope for this guy and his astonishingly misnamed Quality Record Pressings.

There is an interview with Bernie Grundman about the making of this Aja UHQR which can be found on youtube easily enough. In it he admits that it’s mastered from a tape copy. Discogs notes:

“Mastered from an analog, non EQ’d tape copy.”

I guess audiophiles of a certain persuasion — those with an affinity for remastered Heavy Vinyl pressings know who I’m talking about — can take solace in the fact that this new Aja is still better than the unbelievably bad sounding Cisco pressing that came out in 2007. (That Cisco pressing was undeniably NFG on both sides.)

Fremer raved about that record, but now that Bernie has cut a better pressing for The Big Guy, he can obviously see how he got that one wrong, even though he seemed fairly confidant about the quality of the sound in his review from 2007.

Hey, do me a favor and take a minute and see for yourself. The guy who wrote this seems pretty confidant, right?

“This new Cisco reissue is vastly superior to both the original pressing (ABC AA 1006) and to Mobile Fidelity’s ½ speed mastered reissue (Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-0333).

‘If your stereo system (or your personal savior/used record dealer) tells you otherwise, blame it and/or him, not Elliot Scheiner, one of the original engineers on Aja who oversaw this reissue, or Donald Fagen (no introduction necessary), or Kevin Gray and Robert Pincus who mastered it from the original analog tape at AcousTech.”

In case you were wondering, the aforementioned “personal savior/used record dealer” might just be yours truly. I’ve been called worse.

No matter. He goes on to give the Cisco Aja a 10/10 grade. Seriously, those are the grades you see pictured. 10 over 10, no joke as Biden would say. (I guess the music got better in the 17 years that elapsed between the two pressings too. It happens.)

Shortly thereafter he writes:

“This remaster exudes the kind of musical honesty you might expect when one of the original engineers and the artistic center of gravity are involved in its production.”

To my knowledge, there is not a whit of evidence to support the idea that any such original engineer and any such artistic center of gravity were involved in the Cisco production.

Later on he adds:

“By the way, if someone says the reissue doesn’t sound any good, be sure to ask about that person’s playback system. For the record I listened on The Continuum Caliburn turntable with Cobra arm, the Grand Prix Monaco turntable with Graham Phantom arm and the Merrill MS21 turntable with Triplanar arm. Cartridges included Lyra Titan i, Koetsu Urushi Vermillion and Air Tight PC-1. Phono preamps included Einstein Turntable’s Choice and Manley Steelhead. Preamp was darTZeel and amps were Musical Fidelity kWs driving Wilson MAXX2s. Cables were TARA Labs Zero interconnects and Omega speaker cable. Believe me, I heard what’s on the vinyl loud and clear and it’s spectacular!”

Man, that’s got to hurt. If you own any of that stuff, my advice would be to get rid of it, and pronto.

Can Fremer really have wasted that kind of money on equipment that is so far off the mark that a piece-of-garbage record like the Cisco LP actually sounded right to him?

Yes, that’s apparently what happened. And if you have been in the audio game for any length of time, you know that Analog True Believers like him get taken to the cleaners every day of the week.

If Fremer used that same system to review any other records back then, you should seriously consider ignoring his reviews for those too. (My advice, starting in 1994, has never wavered: audiophiles who appreciate good sounding records should make a point of ignoring anything the man says or writes. Or doing the opposite of whatever it is that he advises. Now that I think about it, that might actually work better.)

I’m sure he will tell you that everything system-wise is better now. No doubt the list of equipment he owns is even longer and you can be damn sure the equipment on it is even more expensive.

Now he’s really got Aja’s number. It’s not a 10, it’s an 11!

Some of us remain skeptical. We bump into his writing from time to time, and it sounds pretty much the way it always has. If he’s learned anything about records in the last 30 years, I see no evidence of it.

You can find his Cisco reviews — the original one and the newly corrected one — on his site if you care to do the search. I honestly for the life of me don’t know why anyone would bother.

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Listening in Depth to The Royal Scam

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for The Royal Scam

We really went overboard with the track commentary for this one. This should make it easy for you to compare what we say about the sound of these songs with what they sound like to you on your system, using the copy you own or, better yet, one of our Hot Stampers. 

If you end up with one of our Hot Stampers, listen carefully for the effects we describe below. This is a very tough record to reproduce — everything has to be working in tip-top form to even begin to get this complicated music sounding the way it should — but if you’ve done your homework and gotten your system really cooking, you are in for the time of your Steely Dan life.

Side One

Kid Charlemagne

By far the most sonically aggressive track on this album, Kid Charlemagne is 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 punky 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.

Without the grit and tizz and radio EQ, which could have been added during mastering or caused by the sound of some bad ABC vinyl, who can say which, the sound is actually quite good on the best of the best copies. It’s one of the toughest tests for side one. Sad to say, most copies earn a failing grade right out of the gate.

The Caves of Altamira

This is the best test for side one. There are sweet cymbals at the beginning, and Fagen’s double tracked voice should be silky and smooth, but on the really hot copies it’s also big and alive. When I was first doing these shootouts, I noted that the hi-hat is front and center in the mix of this song, and when that hi-hat sounds grainy or aggressive, it’s positively unlistenable. That hi-hat needs to sound silky and sweet or this song is going to give you a headache, at least at the volume I play it at: GOOD and LOUD.

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Steely Dan – Can’t Buy A Thrill

More Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Can’t Buy a Thrill

  • Big, bold, rich, Tubey Magical sound for this Steely Dan classic, with two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides
  • Side one was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • After doing so many shootouts over the years, and hearing the guitars and vocals jumping out of our speakers right into our listening room, we now find the recording a lot more to our liking than we used to
  • A surprisingly difficult record to find these days with good sound and audiophile quality playing surfaces
  • If you made the mistake of buying the Speaker Corner reissue from 2000, this is your chance to hear the record with all the energy that this band put into their debut, the kind of energy and presence the remastering engineers took out!
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were remarkable craftsmen from the start, as Steely Dan’s debut illustrates. Each song is tightly constructed, with interlocking chords and gracefully interwoven melodies, buoyed by clever, cryptic lyrics.”
  • Two of the key instruments we test for with on album are the piano and the snare, and we break it all down for you here
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were remarkable craftsmen from the start, as Steely Dan’s debut illustrates. Each song is tightly constructed, with interlocking chords and gracefully interwoven melodies, buoyed by clever, cryptic lyrics.”

“Dirty Work” sounds great here — rich and sweet mids, breathy brass, and lots of texture to the vocals. This track often sounds dull and dubby, but it’s actually just a case of the mix being smoother than most of the other songs on the album. If this track sounds smooth, and the other songs sound right, the tonality is correct for the whole side because that’s what the better copies sound like.

Flip the record over and the good times begin all over again. Elliot Randall’s guitar on “Reeling In The Years” has the meaty texture and uncanny presence to take the song to an entirely new level.

“Fire In The Hole” is dynamic with real weight to the piano, and the double-tracked vocals on “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” sound rich and poppy the way they should.

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Steely Dan – Testing for Energy with Green Earrings

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for The Royal Scam

The first two tracks on side two tell you everything you need to know about the sound. Most copies are going to be aggressive. There’s an edge to Fagen’s vocals. It’ll become especially apparent when the backing vocals come in on the line “The rings of rare design.”

If the sound is too midrangy and edgy, you simply do not have a good copy. You will probably not find the experience particularly enjoyable. Rather than getting lost in the music, you may find yourself wondering what the fuss was all about when this classic album came out.

On a musical note, it’s songs like this one and the two that follow that make me realize how energetic an album this is. It’s actually the last high energy album Steely Dan made, second only in that respect to Countdown To Ecstasy.

Regarding the importance of energy in the pressings we audition, this commentary on Zuma may be of interest.

Here are a couple of hundred other albums with specific advice on what to listen for.

Checking the Boxes

The Royal Scam is an album we’ve been playing since 1976, and we think we know it well,

It checks off a number of key boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Steely Dan – Gaucho

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Reviews and Commentaries for Gaucho

  • 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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Steely Dan / The Royal Scam 2-pack

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Reviews and Commentaries for The Royal Scam

  • A stunning 2-pack copy, with side one of the first disc and side two of the second disc both earning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • The general idea behind our 2-packs — examples of which prove that the two sides of the same album can sound very different from each other — can be found here
  • These pressings of The Dan’s hard-rockin’ classic from 1976 has the right sound for this music – rich and meaty, with powerful rhythmic energy
  • 5 stars: “Drummer Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie lashes out the rolling grooves on most of the nine tracks, establishing the album’s anxious feel, and Larry Carlton’s jaw-dropping guitar work provides a running commentary to Fagen’s strangulated vocals… These are not the sort of Steely Dan songs favored by smooth-jazz stations.”
  • Steely Dan’s fifth release is a Must Own album from 1976, Every one of the first 6 albums belong in any audiophile quality Rock and Pop music collection worthy of the name.

The best copies of Steely Dan’s brilliant effort from 1976 — so different from the album before, Katy Lied, as well as the album to follow, Aja — manage to combine richness and smoothness with transparency and clarity, a tough combination to find on The Royal Scam. (more…)

A Killer Can’t Buy a Thrill (and Some Lessons We Learned)

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Steely Dan

During our shootouts, when we drop the needle on a copy and don’t hear that “Hot Stamper” sound, we toss that one and move on to the next. The difference between a truly Hot Stamper and most copies is so obvious that we rarely waste time on the pressings that clearly don’t have any real magic in their grooves.

Like we’ve said after some of our other Steely Dan Hot Stamper shootouts, you would never imagine how good this album can sound after playing the average copy, which is grainy, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail. It’s positively criminal the way this well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP.

And how can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right? The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is we know how hard it is to appreciate good music through bad sound. Bad sound is a barrier to understanding and enjoyment, to us audiophiles anyway.

We Was Wrong About the Sound

Years ago – starting with our first shootout in 2007 for the album as a matter of fact – we had put this warning in our listings:

One thing to note: this isn’t Aja, Pretzel Logic or Gaucho (their three best sounding recordings). We doubt you’ll be using a copy of Can’t Buy A Thrill to demo your stereo.

We happily admit now that we got Can’t Buy a Thrill wrong. It’s actually a very good sounding record – rich, smooth, natural, with an especially unprocessed quality.

In that sense it is superior to most of their catalog; better than Countdown to Ecstasy, Katy Lied, Royal Scam and maybe even Gaucho (which is a bit too artificial and glossy for our tastes, although it might make owners of less revealing equipment or those who find that kind of sound more appealing positively swoon).

You could easily use Can’t Buy a Thrill to demo your stereo, depending on what you were trying to demonstrate. A realistic, solidly-weighted piano comes to mind; there are many songs with an exceptionally well recorded piano on the album.

Mistakes Were No Longer Made

We used to think it sounded flat, cardboardy, veiled and compressed. It’s actually none of those things on the best copies. The reason we didn’t find those problems during our most recent shootouts is that we must have improved our playback. Precisely how I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better. Or maybe it was that in combination with the few new room tweaks. Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know. 

You have to get around to doing the annual shootout for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Who does annual shootouts except us?

Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they are or when they occurred, were incontrovertible.

Can’t Buy A Thrill in 2015-16 was clearly sounding better than ever before.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of making real progress in this hobby by taking advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last twenty years.

Who’s to Blame?

It’s natural to blame sonic shortcomings on the recording; everyone does it. But in this case we was wrong. The cardboardy grain, lack of frequency extension on both ends and overall veiled sound we thought were endemic to the recording are not heard on the best copies. (On the average copy, sure, which is why we don’t sell those, we trade them in.)

We’ve worked diligently for more than a decade on every aspect of record cleaning and reproduction, and now there’s no doubt that we can get Can’t Buy A Thrill to play at a much higher level than we could before. This is why we keep experimenting, and why we encourage you to do the same. The benefits, in time, will be dramatic.

Further Reading

Listening in Depth to Aja

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Aja

More Albums with Key Tracks for Critical Listening

Generally, what you try to get on side one is a copy with ambience, because most copies are flat, lifeless and dry as a bone.

You want a copy with good punchy bass — many are lean, and the first two tracks simply don’t work at all without good bass. And then you want a copy that has a natural top end, where the cymbals ring sweetly and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone isn’t hard or honky or dull, which it often is on the bad domestic copies.

The truly amazing side twos — and they are pretty darn rare — have an extended top end and breathy vocals on the first track, Peg, a track that is dull on nine out of ten copies. (The ridiculously bright MoFi actually kind of works on Peg because of the fact that the mix is somewhat lacking in top end. This is faint praise though: MoFi managed to fix that problem and ruin practically everything else on the album.) If you play Peg against the tracks that follow it on side two most of the time the highs come back. On the best of the best, the highs are there all the way through.

Side One

Black Cow

Fagen’s voice on the first line will always sound grainy – it’s that way on the CD and every LP I have ever played, which means it’s on the tape that way. It will quickly pass, and the rest of the vocals will sound amazing if you have a Hot Stamper Copy.

This song is as BIG and BOLD sounding as any pop song I know. This is Demo Disc material if you have the system to do it justice.

And don’t you just love the way it starts on the upbeat? Now that’s the way to kick off an album!

Aja

Got a big speaker? Lots of power? You will need both to play this song right. Note how the percussion comes through the dense mix, without being abrasive in any way. That’s a sure sign that you have a copy with the transparency and resolution you need to bring out the track’s best qualities. The mix needs that percussion; it’s there for a reason. You, dear audiophile, need an LP that lets that percussion be heard. Many are called; few are chosen.

Deacon Blues

It’s the rare copy that gets the top end for the first two tracks right and still has enough presence and top end for this song, which will tend to sound dull even if the first two tracks don’t. The truly killer pressings get all three tracks to sound amazing, no mean feat.

Side Two

Hey, Watch Your Levels

For some mysterious reason, side two is almost always cut at a lower level than side one. Pump up the volume a db or two in order to get the full Aja effect for the songs on this side.

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If You Can’t Make a Good Record, Why Make Any Record At All?

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Can’t Buy A Thrill

This Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl pressing has to be one of the worst sounding versions ever pressed.

You think the average ABC or MCA pressing is opaque, flat and lifeless, not to mention compromised at both ends of the frequency spectrum?

You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!

As bad as the typical copy of this album is, the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl is even worse, with not a single redeeming quality to its credit.

If this is what passes for an Audiophile Record these days, and it is, it’s just one more nail in the coffin for Heavy Vinyl.

But that’s not the half of it.

Go to Acoustic Sounds’ website and read all the positive customer reviews — they love it! Is there any heavy vinyl pressing on the planet that a sizable contingent of audiophiles won’t say something nice about, no matter how bad it sounds? I can’t think of one.

To sum up, this record is nothing less than an affront to analog itself. I guarantee you the CD is better, if you get a good one. I own four or five and the best of them has far more musical energy than this thick, dull, opaque and boring piece of audiophile analog trash.

It was probably made from a digital copy of the master, or more likely a digital copy of an analog dub of the master — three generations, that’s sure what it sounds like — but that’s no excuse.

If you can’t make a good record, don’t make any record at all. Shelve the project. The audiophile vinyl world is drowning in bad sounding pressings; we don’t need any more, thank you very much.