New remastering of Steely Dan's Katy Lied review by Fremer

@slaw He has the "Charlie Rose" disease.

Without judging any of the musical content, I find a number of SD recordings really shy of the audiophile mark.

KL -- It's decent sounding but there is a fuzzy quality to the highs and the vocals are too recessed. It is better on this mix but still below other SD recordings.

Nightfly -- really painful to listen to; digital, bright, harsh, strident. Almost no combination of gear (tubes, etc.) have made it sound very good or easy to listen to.

Gaucho -- bad in the Nightfly way. Moments of real audiophile bliss on here, but overall, it's hard to listen to all the way through. Glare-nightmare.

Aja -- very good to excellent but still not the best of SD or Fagen corpus.

Kamakiriad and Sunken Condos (Fagen) -- ok, now we're talking. This is a fantastic sounding album; lots of space, great midrange and highs. Lots of space.

Morph the Cat (Fagen) -- Also very good. This album is really crammed with  overlays and so while it sounds sonically good (tonally), it's not the "wide open road" feeling I get from Kamakiriad and Sunken Condos.

Royal Scam is just ok; I'd put it between KL and Aja.

Y'all can fill in the rest. Or not.

I always thought it was something inferior at my end of the food chain

I thought that too, but it's endemic to a lot of popular albums unless the artist wrests a lot of control away from the record companies.

Part of it seems to be that Fagen has gotten more interested, lately, in how things work, sonically. This is a very human but probably correct part of the explanation as to why recent albums sound so good. Just a hunch.

"Although Steely Dan wore their love of studio technology on their sleeves, it seems that this was driven more by Walter Becker and engineer Roger Nichols than by Fagen. "Roger and Walter were always more interested in technology and in what the latest thing was," explains Fagen. "Walter's father was a hi-fi nut in the late '50s and '60s, and Walter is a science prodigy who went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, a specialist school for kids who are really good at science. I also got into high fidelity and I like good sounds, but I was never as much into the technical side of things."

Elliott Scheiner, who also worked on The Nightfly but not on Kamakiriad, agrees, but finds that things have changed. "Donald has become much more savvy as far as what takes place in the studio is concerned," he says. "He now knows what the technical issues are and what can and can't be done, whereas a dozen years ago Donald didn't know or didn't care, he just wanted to get things done. For this new album it was a great process to be working just with him, and he definitely made a lot of comments, but he is not specific about certain things. As far as EQ is concerned, he'll say 'I want a bit more top end there, or low end on the voice,' general comments like that."

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/donald-fagen

@boostedis Um, no one has mentioned the lyrics because (a) we know them, (b) the band is named after a sex toy in Burrough's Naked Lunch (go read it), and (c) this is fiction not prurient tabloid fact-bait. 

As for your mention of  "knowing Becker’s troubles with the law as it relates to pedophilia" can you share some evidence that what you know is true? If you're speculating, perhaps out of respect for the man you can delete your comment.

What I’ve read is that DBX noise reduction was to blame, not tape machines, but in the liner notes, FWIW, there are no complaints to back this up.

The DBX problem -- and a crisis at the time -- is well established. There is still some problematic aspects to the original recording as @slaw indicates. A real shame.

In the liner notes, Fagan and Becker do mention "our splendid double Magneplanar monitor. system and newly acquired and fabulously expensive Audio Research D-76 tube power amps", which would reinforce the assertions about Becker at least being an audiophile.

These notes indicate how misguided they all were -- the studio should never have used such equipment for mixing room playback. I mean, really, 1 in 100,000 people have a system like that, so it's a terrible baseline for making a record. If they based their judgments on that system, well, that's just another possible reason everything wound up sounding so mediocre.

Um, I quoted Donald Fagen using an expletive to describe his reaction to the great Denny Dias’s guitar solo. It’s an amazing solo and moment. It’s here.

Sorry for quoting the word Fagen used. That got my post deleted. 

Apparently, the "use/mention" distinction is irrelevant on this forum. I was not USING the expletive, I was MENTIONING it, because it was relevant to Fagen’s reaction.

Haven't seen a thread with this much overstated garbage in a long time.

Your criticism suffers from the same distemper as the sentence you're criticizing. Kinda invalidates it and impugns you.

[The recording of KL] responds very well to my tinkering around with bass and treble on my PEQ-1. I can make it sound excellent. Therefore it is not an inherently bad recording.

If we said that a certain brand of ground beef responded well to a lot of seasoning and bbq sauce, it would seem sensible to conclude that the meat must not be very good to require all that fussing. The analogy holds, in my view, for KL. 

Perhaps we can meat (!) in the middle and agree that KL is not a "bad" recording but it has a lot of room for improvement. If you're good at tinkering with the sound using your PEQ, then it would be interesting to see how good you could make the *new* version of KL. There seems to be a broad consensus that it's meat of a higher grade.

@slaw It's like that bathroom graffito: "No matter how beautiful s/he is, someone, somewhere is sick of their sh*t."

The high res is quieter. Older masterings sometimes increased the perceived loudness of a track by applying audio compression, which evened out louder and softer peaks/troughs and then normalized the tracks so that the largest peaks are just short of clipping. The end result is louder but in the process the dynamic range has been compressed original. A good remastering would be quieter, overall, to increase the "space" available to play out the original dynamic range, shy of clipping.

Cool. Some remasters are higher res but poorly done. Everything comes down to the motivations and the people doing it.

In theory you are right that this quieter less compressed version should always sound better. 

I didn't say better.

@zarf Most welcome. I think the expletive tells a rather BIG story, namely that DF, who is hard to impressed, was blown away by Dias's solo. I think the information content of that expletive really shows why blunt moderation is a bad thing.

And that’s just what most of them are, differences.  I really didn’t find most of the differences an improvement to the album.

My experience, exactly. It's weird because one hears a difference and thinks, "That's better" -- at first. But keep listening and that judgment changes in the direction you indicate.