Yesterday, I heard Steely Dan’s “Black Friday” as a Pandora random selection. I heard the song again today, when Mark Lindsay played it on his SiriusXM show, American Revolution. I took that as a sign, not that I should go shopping, but that I should write about the notorious technical nightmare associated with the album Katy Lied.
I was immediately disappointed the first time when playing Katy Lied. Not disappointed in the album itself, because I was only a couple of minutes into it, but with the sound. What I heard when playing it on my JVC VL-5 turntable (that I regret very much no longer having) belied the production’s care and attention to detail, as explained in the liner notes.
The overall sound seemed somewhat “hard,” with the percussion and cymbals having an unusually brittle quality. The description of a 24-track tape recorder meant that noise reduction had been used. Did something go wrong with that?
Yes, something went wrong with the noise reduction. As I later read in an audio magazine article, a lot of “golden ear” listeners could tell that something was amiss in the final mix. A Boston company called dbx had faulty gear, resulting in the need for a hastily re-created mix, as explained here.