steelkatyl

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).

(more…)

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…)

Rose Darling’s Piano Favors Fast Electronics and Tight Bass

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

As a huge Steely Dan fan starting with the second album, Countdown to Ecstasy, I rushed down to the local Tower Records to buy Katy Lied as soon I heard it had come out.

Of course I fell in love it with immediately. It has long been a personal favorite, the ultimate expression of the art of Steely Dan on record. I’ve played it many hundreds of times over the last 40+ 50+ years and still listen to it regularly. I cannot imagine ever tiring of it.

Testing with Rose Darling

The piano is tough to get right on this track. If the piano doesn’t sound the way it should, this track will be a mess.

It’s big and bold in the mix and should sound really solid and weighty. Thin or washed out and you are in trouble.

This track punishes equipment that is slow, or has blubbery bass response. Vintage tube equipment is not what the doctor ordered.

If your woofers are too small, or you do not have enough low end definition and weight to reproduce such a large and powerful piano, the part the piano plays in the arrangement will suffer and so will the song. (More on the kind of speakers you need to play this album and hundreds of others here.)

Just wrote this today, please to enjoy:

Throw Back the Little Ones

I’ve been listening to Waka/Jawaka quite a bit lately. On this song, Steely Dan incorporates an homage to Zappa’s unique woodwind and horn arrangements starting at about 1:48. Go to youtube and check it out when you have a minute.

Jimmie Haskell gets the credit for the arrangement but I’m pretty sure I know who inspired him.

Further Reading

Katy Lied – A MoFi that Beggars Belief

Katy Lied is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

By the time I was avidly collecting Mobile Fidelity records in the late 70s, this title had already gone out of print, one of the first to do so. My guess is that even the cloth-eared audiophiles at MoFi knew when they had a turkey on their hands and mercilessly put this one out of its misery.

Yes, the sound is so bad that even the brain trust at MoFi could hear it. 

Compressed and lifeless (almost as lifeless as the screen speakers so popular at the time), it’s hard to imagine any version sounding worse than this one. (Which is why it’s on this list.)

And yet I continued to play my copy, for enjoyment of course, oblivious — I must have been oblivious, right? — to the bad sound.

Why? That’s hard to say, but here’s a stab at it.

The vinyl was exceptionally quiet for one thing, and for another, as an audiophile I knew this MoFi pressing had been made with tender loving care, using a putatively superior process, Half-Speed mastering, from the original master tapes, and had been pressed in Japan on the quietest, flattest vinyl in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

My old story about One Man Dog gets to the heart of it.

I didn’t understand records very well and I sure didn’t understand the value of doing shootouts — or even how to do them — using multiple copies of the same album.

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If You Are At All Serious About Audio, You Cop to Your Mistakes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

And to think I used to swear by this pressing of Katy Lied — specifically the 2000 Yen reissue, not the 1500 Yen original, which sounded dull, more like the average domestic original I was trying to better.

This one is brighter and cleaner, but at the cost of more distortion, more congestion and, now that I have a better understanding of records and their variations, an incorrect tonal balance. The Japanese tried to fix the smooth sound of the dubbed tape they were given and, in so doing, ruined what was good about the sound. 

Another example of just how wrong one can be — one, in this case, being me circa 1995.

Let’s Talk About Us

We happily admit to our mistakes because we know that all this audio stuff and especially the search for Hot Stampers is a matter of trial and error.

We do the trials; we run the experiments,

That’s the only way to avoid the kinds of errors most audiophiles make in their quest to find the best sounding pressings of their favorite albums,.

Being skeptical of every claim you have not tested for yourself is key to getting good results from this kind of work.

Of course, being human we can’t help but make our share of mistakes. More than our share; we’ve made them by the hundreds.

The difference is that we learn from them. We report the facts to the best of our ability for every shootout we do.

Every record gets a chance to show us what it’s made of, regardless of where it was made, who made it or why they made it. 

If we used to like it and now we don’t, that’s what you will read in our commentary. Our obligation is to only one person: you, the listener. (Even better: you, the customer. Buy something already and see what you have been missing.)

On every shootout we do now, if the notes are more than six months old, we toss them out. They mean nothing. Things have changed, radically, and that’s the way it should be.

With each passing year you should be hearing more of everything on your favorite LPs.

That’s the thrill of this hobby — those silly old records just keep getting better. I wish someone could figure out how to make digital get better. They’ve had forty years and it still leaves me wanting more. You too, I’m guessing.

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Letter of the Week – “Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile.”

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased back in 2017 [the bolding of the text has been added by us.]

Hey Tom, 

Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile. I discovered the Better Records website way back in 2007, but being a hardcore skeptic I didn’t purchase anything until almost two years later. Although I agreed with the premise that different pressings have varying degrees of sound quality, I simply could not believe that any record could sound so much better to justify the prices. Frankly, I thought that the buyers of these records were folks with more money than sense.

What finally drove me to purchase my first Hot Stamper was my attempt to find a decent copy of Carole King’s Tapestry album. I had decided to try the Better Records approach and gathered half a dozen copies, as well as the Classic heavy vinyl reissue that I had read good things about. Talk about an exercise in futility. Despite a thorough cleaning with Disc Doctor, no copy sounded significantly better than any of the others. However, Better Records just happened to have a 1+ copy of Tapestry on sale for $75 at the time, so I decided to take the plunge and buy it, even though I still thought the price was outrageous.

What followed next absolutely stunned and amazed me. Although I was prepared to shoot out the Hot Stamper against my own copies, I knew within the first minute of play that it would be totally unnecessary. The Hot Stamper sounded like a completely different recording. I cannot stress this enough. Everything sounded much, much more lifelike and REAL, as if I was listening to the performance inside the recording studio, instead of sitting outside hearing it through the walls. Of particular note was the fact that I could hear the personality in Ms. King’s voice, with all the attendant subtle inflections and timbre; she sounded like a real person, not just a recording of one. The $75 price was suddenly transformed into a real bargain, and the skeptic in me died completely. (more…)

Katy Lied – Our Four Plus Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

This White Hot Stamper side one of Katy Lied is an ABSOLUTE KNOCKOUT. Even our usual top grade of A Triple Plus was not enough to tell the story, so we awarded this side one the rare Four Plus (A++++) grade.

The sound is HUGE — big, bold, dynamic, and lively. The clarity and transparency exceeded all our expectations; we felt as if we were hearing every last Steely Dan-sweated detail. The overall sound is natural, relaxed, and musical. The highs are as sweet as they come (which is not as sweet as they should have been, more about that later) and the bottom end has the weight and punch this music needs to rock.

(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 words containing the word “rock”.)

One quality this copy had that no other copy in our shootout managed to convey: on Chain Lightning the voices stretch from wall to wall and fill out the space between the speakers like we have never heard before! Wow. On this copy that song is a Demo Disc Quality Thrill like you will not believe.

A Tough Nut? You Better Believe It

This is one of the TOUGHEST NUTS TO CRACK in the entire Steely Dan catalog, if not THE toughest. We manage to do this album about once a year; it takes us at least that long to find a dozen or so clean, decent-sounding original copies. Most copies are beat and most copies don’t sound good anyway.

It’s easy to blame DBX for the bad sound of so many copies, but this is a cop-out. Most of the bad sound comes from ABC’s bad pressings. This music can sound awfully good; more than enough proof can be provided by simply playing this amazing side two.

Side Two

This side two earned an A++ grade. It was one of the few copies we played with real extension on the top end, a serious shortcoming on practically every copy we auditioned. The music on this side comes ALIVE like nobody’s business.

You will have no trouble hearing why we fell in love with this copy. The sound is so RICH and FULL. This is, more than anything else, what Katy Lied really gets right. The pianos and congas and toms have tremendous weight and body, along with plenty of rhythmic energy to drive the music. Everything is working so well you may find yourself singing along with abandon to classics like Everyone’s Gone to the Movies and Chain Lightning. We did.

Michael McDonald is a wonderful accompanist. His soaring harmonies on this album are breathtaking, even more so here than on Aja.

Of special note is Phil Woods’ sax solo on Doctor Wu. On most copies it is too thin, with not enough body, too much bite and sourness or hardness, but here it is smooth and natural — easy on the ears you might say. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “Unbelievable difference in sound, outstanding!!!!”

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 recently:

Hey Tom, 

Guys, seriously, all three copies, completely out of control !! Unbelievable difference in sound, outstanding!!!!

Thank you.

Alonso,

It was our pleasure. Now you know what Hot Stampers are all about — the sound you can’t find any other way, especially on records that are hard to find with good sound such as Katy Lied ,

Best, TP