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

Katy Lied, content wise, is one of my favorite SD albums. The integrity of the recording from the perspective of accuracy and resolution is there, as it 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. On the other hand, the bad recordings that do exist out there I have a hard time making them “better,” if you will, with tonal adjustments. Honestly I find the clarity of the album quite good. Have not heard the remaster. 

I always loved the SD records; although I did burn them out a bit over the years. The UHQR KL version was purchased for me for my birthday last year. I just got it. Now, I am lucky enough to have some nice gear to listen to it on and I liked that UHQR pressing so much that I just bought the whole SD UHQR catalog. To my ears the KL UHQR version sounds much more balanced with voices easy to understand and much better instrument separation. I'm waiting delivery of the other albums. I must admit I wish the 45RPM versions didn't sound better as I like the "length" of an LP. But I must admit, they mostly do with most of these reissues.......IMHO  

I own the UHQR version of Katy Lied (and all of the other SD releases as well*). IMO, I may be most shocked and impressed with KL. I can't believe what a clean, distortion-free recording it is. The quality of the recording made me want to keep turning it up. Obviously, I'm a huge Steely Dan fan and I love this record. For me, the $150 for the UHQR was well worth it. 
 

*Still waiting on the release of Royal Scam

[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.

I’ve an original “digital masters series” version of the album that sounds very nice ( KL).  But for pure musical nirvana of SD, I love their final studio album “everything must go” especially the title track….very well done.  I also disagree with statements earlier about Fagans Nightfly album, I think it sounds amazing!