Category: Music

This quote from the Wikipedia page about Steely Dan’s Katy Lied aligns with what I remember reading long ago about the album in a hi-fi magazine article. The citation Wikipedia is looking for is undoubtedly in that particular issue.

Band leaders Becker & Fagen said they were dissatisfied with the album’s sound quality because of an equipment malfunction with the then-new dbx noise reduction system. The damage was mostly repaired after consulting with the engineers at dbx, but Becker & Fagen still refused to listen to the completed album.[citation needed]

To refresh my memory of the original sound, I listened to my 70’s vinyl copy of Katy Lied on my living room system with the Thorens TD-166 MKII and Ortofon Super OM 20. I’m now ready to revise my opinion.

It’s brilliant! Ignoring my quibbles about the mix, the way the lacquer master was cut, as described in yesterday’s post, is outstanding. I am especially impressed with the dynamics. Here’s the first minute of “Black Friday”, played on the office turntable, a Pioneer PL-112D with Shure M92.

WOWEE! That is one dynamic cut of vinyl! There’s certainly no loudness compression going on there.

Seeing that graph made me wonder if swapping in my Grado Green cartridge would be up to the challenge of tracking the record. The answer is no, it isn’t. The difference in volume isn’t the issue, it’s the crackling that can be heard when listening with headphones.

So, aside from the noise reduction equalization snafu, resulting in the hasty re-mix, Katy Lied is an impressive technical production. It’s especially noteworthy for its early use of a computerized cutting lathe in the final stage of mastering the record.

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.