steelpretz

Donald Gets Dynamic on Rikki

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Pretzel Logic is one knockout of a recording.

Having done shootouts for every Steely Dan title, I can say that sonically this one has no equal in their canon. (Click on that link to see two hundred others.)

Which is really saying something, since Becker and Fagen are known to be audiophiles themselves and real sticklers for sound. No effort in the recording of this album was spared, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.

They sweated the details on this one. The mix is perfection.

But you would never know it by playing the average pressing of this album, which is dull, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail.

(We’ve played plenty of records — actually, specific pressings of records — that were dull, compressed, and dead as a doornail. We’ve made links for them by the hundreds here so that audiophiles who do not want records with these problems can more easily avoid them.)

It’s positively criminal the way this amazingly well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP pressing. Hint: avoid all imports and anything not on ABC.) How can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right?

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Pretzel Logic – Our Four Plus Shootout Winner from 2011

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

This BEYOND White Hot side one (A++++) of Pretzel Logic has nothing less than master tape sound. [Whatever that is!] Our Four Plus ranking is rare enough, but in this case it has the added benefit of conferring upon this very pressing the status of the best sounding Steely Dan recording we have ever heard.

There is no better recording in the Steely Dan catalog, and I don’t think there’s a copy anywhere that’s any better than this on side one. (To see what we consider to be the single best sounding album from two hundred(!) other artists, please click here.)

UPDATE 2026

  • Note that only one side on this pressing was actually any good. Side two earned a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+. We no longer sell records with grades that low.
  • In 2011 we still had a lot to learn about Pretzel Logic, but this copy sure had us fired up at the time, and that’s a good thing, right?
  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it changes our undertanding of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question might have been “How high is up?”

This Beyond White Hot Pretzel Logic has got it all: tons of energy, mindblowing transparency, uncanny presence, and lots of deep bass. We feel Pretzel Logic is the band’s best sounding recording, and here’s a copy that will show you why.

There’s lots of room around the drums, texture to the bass, breath to the vocals, and weight to the bottom end. The clarity is unbelievable and the overall sound is HUGE! The piano sounds AMAZING and the top end is silky sweet. It’s more open and more alive than you could ever imagine.

We’ve been playing this record since it came out in 1973 and this is the first “Four Plus” A++++ grade we have ever awarded it. The sound is Demo Disc quality of the highest order.

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Listening in Depth to Pretzel Logic

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

It’s positively criminal how mediocre this amazingly well-recorded album sounds on the average pressing of it. How can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music of Pretzel Logic when it sounds like that?

The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is that we know how hard it is to enjoy good music when it doesn’t sound right.

Bad sound is a barrier to deeper understanding and a more intense listening experience, which is why I spent 50 years building a stereo that could play a record like Pretzel Logic right, or at least as right as I could get it to sound. (Speaking of sound, acquiring this preamp only a few years after discovering the music of Steely Dan changed everything for me.)

I also credit Pretzel Logic, probably more than any other album of theirs, with helping me dramatically improve the quality of my playback.

Side One

Rikki Don’t Lose That Number

By far the biggest hit on this album and one of the biggest for the band, it’s also one of the clearest indicators of Hot Stamper Sound. The Horace Silver inspired intro is at its best when you can easily hear the acoustic guitar in the left channel doubling the piano. On most copies it’s blurry and dull, which causes it to get lost in the mix. Transparent copies pull it out in the open where it belongs.

That’s the first test, but the real test for this track is how well the (surprisingly) DYNAMIC chorus is handled. On a properly mastered and pressed copy, Fagen’s singing in the chorus is powerful and very present. He is RIGHT THERE, full of energy and drive, challenging the rest of the band to keep up with him. And they do! The best copies demonstrate what a lively group of musicians he has backing him on this track. (If you know anything about Steely Dan’s recordings, you know the guys in these sessions are the best of the best.)

Check out the big floor tom that gets smacked right before the first chorus. On the best copies the whomp factor is off the scale.

Shocking as it may seem, most copies of this album are DOA on this track. They’re severely compressed — they never come to life, they never get LOUD. The result? Fagen and the band sound bored. And that feeling is contagious.

Of course few audiophiles have any idea how dynamic this recording can be because they’ve never heard an especially good pressing played back on a big speaker system in a big room.

Only a handful of the copies we played had the truly powerful dynamics heard on the best copies. These are Pretzel Logics with far more life than I ever dreamed possible. Who knew?

As an aside, back in 1976 I had my fifty favorite albums professionally cleaned on a KMAL record cleaning machine at the stereo store I worked at. They would give you a custom record sleeve along with the cleaning, and sure enough I found my original Pretzel Logic with its KMAL sleeve. My copy was pretty good but no Hot Stamper. So, yes, it really did take us thirty years to find the best copy!

(I took the picture of the KMAL sleeve you see to the left partly because it provides a piece of factual evidence that I really didn’t have a clue about records in 1976. I was proud to be the owner of an original British pressing of Led Zeppelin II — which is absolutely the wrong pressing of the album if you are interested in good sound — but of course I had no way to know that back then.  (more…)

Letter of the Week – “…now I’m compelled to listen, it’s just so damned good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stamper pressings he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom,

You bring up several experiences that can happen with listening to Hot Stampers, and I’ve had them all (which has caused me to pay more attention to you than I might have, since you clearly learn as you age, which makes you a rarity.)

I often come up with my own – they don’t count unless there are multiple instances. Here’s one — I’ve been meaning to write you with a list of many, but it’s always in the middle of listening, so it never gets done.

Records that have been forever more or less my least liked of a particular band suddenly become my favorite.

This is really weird, but it happens often enough to notice.

Pretzel Logic is the most obvious.

Never really like it much, but the sound quality of yours is so amazingly better than any other I’ve heard, I just fell into the music, even though I’d heard it for decades. I totally love this record now, and the most it would get from me in the past was a grudging acknowledgement of its existence.

I suppose I should at least mention two, but I’ll have to modify the category, lol. Records where I love the music, but can’t stand to listen, but now with a HS, I can’t get enough.

It’s not just that now I can listen, but that now I’m compelled to listen, it’s just so damned good.

Really, this one is one of my absolute favorites for pure sound quality, and the music is so up my alley I can’t believe I get both on the same record. Okay, Every Picture Tells a Story. Wow, what a record, er, stamper.

There was a time not long ago, a few years, that I thought I could help myself by ignoring the Heavy Vinyl but buying the SACD or whatever from the same companies. Maybe there’re some good ones, but Rod’s Masterpiece certainly wasn’t one of them.

Take Care,

Erich H.

Erich,

Thanks so much for your letter. As you point out, I know exactly what you mean.

However, I fell in love with both of those albums after the first play, so how they failed to impress you the first time around is probably mostly attributable to a fact of record collecting that few audiophiles seem to appreciate: luck.

The first time I played Pretzel Logic I was amazed at the sound quality of the copy I had just bought from Tower Records. That would have been 1974, and the way I would have found out that the album had been released is by going in the store every week and checking out all the newest arrivals.

Obviously they sold me an original — nothing else existed at the time — and although it may not technically have been a Hot Stamper — they didn’t exist either — it was most assuredly a very good sounding copy.

I was already a big Steely Dan fan after playing Countdown to Ecstasy for months on end. This album put them right up there with all of my favorite bands of the day, bands that were dedicated to making their record albums as emotionally powerful a listening experience as possible, and ensuring the quality — sonically and musically — was as high as possible from the first note to the last. (Here are two others that tell that same story.)

The copy I had in 1971 of Every Picture Tells a Story would have been the domestic original as well. The right stampers on that title are amazing sounding — as you now know firsthand, since that’s what we sent you — but of course that is something I would have had no understanding of at the time and wouldn’t come to appreciate for another twenty years or more.

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Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic

More of the Music of Steely Dan

  • Here is an early ABC Stereo pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum of the guitars, along with the kind of richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern remasterings (particularly on side two)
  • Becker and Fagen spared no effort in the recording of this album – the mix is perfection
  • A Top 100 Album and our pick for The Best Sounding Steely Dan Recording of Them All
  • 5 stars: “Steely Dan made more accomplished albums than Pretzel Logic, but they never made a better one.”

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Letter of the Week – “Very tubey, we love it.”

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,  

Funny enough, I listened to Pretzel Logic yesterday. Very tubey, we love it. I have an AAB-1006 (RE-3) pressing of Aja that sounds fantastic. (If you have any insight on that pressing I’d love to hear it!)

I replied:

Dear Sir,

Thanks for your letter.

There are so many stampers for that record, and the same stamper that sounds great on one copy can sound terrible on another, so we just buy them and play them and let the chips fall where they may.

And, of course, if we did know that RE-3 was a killer Hot Stamper, we wouldn’t tell you anyway!

Best, TP

UPDATE 2025

This is not actually true anymore and has not been true for many years.

We don’t buy everything we can find, not at the prices these records command now.

There are good stampers that we go after, all early pressings of course, and plenty that we know to be at best mediocre and too often worse than mediocre that we avoid.

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There Aren’t Many Shortcuts in Audio, But We Might Actually Know of a Couple

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Our last shootout for Pretzel Logic occurred in 2021, more than four years ago. We wrote about our fondness for the album here, along with some advice regarding what the best pressings do better than most.

Any grit or grain will show itself on the title track big time, especially if you like to play this album as loud as I do, which is LOUD. The power of all those voices singing at the top of their lungs should give you chills.

At moderate levels chills are a lot harder to come by.

Most audiophiles play their music much too quietly. Sometimes this is due to obvious system limitations, but often it seems to be merely a preference. (Without a spacious, heavily-treated room, no system, regardless of quality, can hope to be able to get the huge choruses of Pretzel Logic to soar the way they do on the best copies we shootout.)

I want to have a powerful emotional experience when playing an album like this. I want to be thrilled. That just isn’t possible at the kind of comfortable listening levels most audiophiles prefer. This music performed live would be very loud, because rock concerts are very loud.

Why wouldn’t we want to reproduce the sound of the live event?

We followed that up with some advice for the advanced audiophile — our code for one who knows not to waste his money on modern reissues — to allow him to enjoy the hell out of the album in ways that would have been all but impossible before we came along:

We’ve been known to remark that there are no shortcuts in audio.

You have to put in years — decades even — of mostly tedious work to get your stereo and room to be able to reproduce music properly.

But there exists one very obvious shortcut in audio, and another sort-of shortcut, that will allow you to get much better sound than you could on your own without putting in the huge amounts of time that are usually required.

The first one is a Hot Stamper pressing.

We’ve already found the record of your dreams for you. This saves you an awful lot of time — time we think you’ll agree is better spent listening to records rather than digging through dusty record bins in dingy record stores trying to find them. (Or wasting money on some Heavy Vinyl wannabe that will never come close to the experience of playing the real thing.) 

The other is record cleaning.

After years of experimentation, we’ve got the science of record cleaning down to a T. It’s partly why our records sound so good; they’ve been cleaned right. We have available the most important element to proper recording cleaning — the right fluids.

All you need then is a good machine and the time and patience to put it to work.

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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…)

With Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy Is Where It All Started for Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Countdown to Ecstasy was the first Steely Dan album I ever bought. The Rolling Stone raved about it in a review — this would have been sometime in 1973 — so I figured I had better find out what they were on about and pick up a copy. (Two years later, Rolling Stone would later rave about a new release from a band I had literally never heard of, Roxy Music. I went right down and picked up a copy of the album, Siren, and that record turned out to be a life-changing experience as well.)

I thought it was pretty good at first, not much more than that really, but I kept playing it and playing it and it wasn’t long before it became one of my favorite albums and Steely Dan one of my favorite bands.

A few years later, the bulk of my listening would be made up of music by Steely Dan, Roxy Music, Supertramp, Bowie, Ambrosia and 10cc. (Yes, no Beatles yet, I hadn’t come back around to them by then. I had to wait for the MoFi Beatles Box from 1982 and what I thought was its superior sound in order to fall in love with their music all over again. Little did I know…)

Then Pretzel Logic was released. I was living in San Diego at the time and I used to go into my local Tower Records across from the Sports Arena as often as I could, just to see what might have come out that week.

There they were. They had boxes full of them, laid out on the floor in front of the cash registers. I grabbed a copy, sped home and threw it on the turntable. As you might imagine, it proceeded to blow my mind, as would happen with Katy Lied and The Royal Scam and Aja when they came out in each of the following years. [1]

Records Like These

And it’s records like these that make us want to improve our stereo systems. I used to play the song Pretzel Logic to demo my system, but I can assure you that there is no way in the world I was reproducing the information on that record even a tenth as well I can now.

This is precisely what is supposed to drive this hobby — the plain and simple desire to get the music you love to sound better so that you can enjoy it more.

If you’re an audiophile, then by definition you love good sound. Pretzel Logic is a very well recorded album and it can have WONDERFUL sound.

Finding a copy of the album that was mastered and pressed properly is the hard part.

Learning how to really get the LP clean and putting together the kind of stereo that can play such a complex recording are also difficult.

All three things combined require the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars and the investment of many thousands of hours of time if the result is to be completely satisfying. Very few audiophiles will ever get there, but some will. We did, and you can too. Just follow our approach and your success is almost guaranteed.

Countdown to Ecstasy checks off a few key boxes for us:

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Letter of the Week – “The expanding contours of the music filled my room.”

More of the Music of Steely Dan

More Reviews and Commentaries for Pretzel Logic

This week’s entry is from our good friend Phil, who put a fresh twist on Pretzel Logic with his letter below, which includes the line:

“An extraordinary melange of glorious guiltars, voices, drums.”

Yeah baby!

“It was like a magic carpet ride into a dark cave filled with jewel boxes of brilliant stones. Bejewelled sound. An extraordinary melange of glorious guiltars, voices, drums. The expanding contours of the music filled my room. The best sounding rock album I’ve ever heard.”

Phil, whatever you’re smokin’, give me a hit and I’ll join you in that “dark cave filled with jewel boxes of brilliant stones”! Reminds me a lot of my listening room, except for the part about the stones. (more…)