Check out the Roger Nichols website

I found this site and thought it was pretty interesting (especially for all you Dan freaks out there - that includes me of course ):

Roger Nichols website

Under the Archiving link there's an interesting discussion on the whole tape baking thing - he has other ideas involving vacuuming the tapes!

 

Roger Nichols has a lot of splainin' to do about the sound of Two Against Nature, one of the worst sounding discs this side of Kamirikiad I ever heard. If that isn't proof positive for devolution, I don't know what is. On the Breath of Life scale it gets a zero. Maybe a negative number even. When we have all transplanted our brains into robot bodies with robot ears, this is the sound we will like, made BY robots FOR robots.
TP

 

So true, Tom! I got rid of that damn CD the next day after buying it. It's not that the music is bad at all! It's just that it's so sterile that it has no life! Nichols and the Dan are trying to be soooo perfect that they are forgetting about feeling. After listening to it I didn't remember a note of it.

"Kamirikaid" was tolerable but "Two Against Nature" is THE worst! You can't even bounce it down to analog because they tweaked every note!

 

I haven't heard Two Againt Nature but it doesn't surprise me to hear that it sounds that way.

Gaucho was pretty bad to my ears - very sterile sound .

Aja was starting to head that way too. For me, The Royal Scam is the last truly great sounding Dan recording.

 

In my A/B comparison, the latest CD remaster of Aja and the original ABC LP sound EXACTLY the same.

So, the CD is exactly what the LP sounded like. If you think the new MCA Aja CD sounds sterile, play your LP. Your mind is playing tricks on you!

 

There are 50 different "original" LPs of Aja, so that comparison is not particularly useful.

Every once in awhile I will find one with a hot side 1 or hot side 2, but they are mostly mediocre, like almost all the LPs for Dan, which never seem to be made from anything but third generation eq'd copy tapes, to my ears. The tonal balance is sometimes dead on, but all the transients get smeared and ambience is severely reduced.

Originals of Royal Scam can sometimes be the best. I have a WLP that kicks ass! Same with Countdown: 1 out of 30 sound good, but oh that one...

And get the half speed of Gaucho on MCA Audiophile (not Masterphile.) Cut at IAM (and maybe not half speed mastered!) it is superb sounding.
TP

 

Very interesting information.

I recently found an 'original' Aja for a quarter, couldn't pass it up even though I already had an 'original' Aja at home. The difference in sound is amazing, absolutly amazing. Far better than my first 'original', almost like hearing it for the first time. Same thing happened with 'Countdown...'.

Since I've owned clean early Steely Dan copies for a while, I thought my work was done. Nope, it's just starting
I can't imagine that my copy of 'Pretzel Logic' could sound any better, but I don't mind another surprise.
Dan C

 

I got the LP the day it came out.
Whether the latest CD remaster is correct only Roger Nichols can answer, not Tom Port.