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    Josh Mound

    The Best Version Of… Steely Dan’s Aja

     

    When Walter Becker passed away in September 2017, it marked the end of one of the most quixotic music partnerships in modern American popular music. The only constant members of Steely Dan, Becker and co-conspirator Donald Fagen created some of the most lyrical intelligent, musically intricate, and sonically impeccable albums of the past 40 years. 

     

    For both record buyers and audiophiles, none looms larger than 1977’s Aja, the subject of the third installment of “The Best Version Of…” (TBVO). 

     

    Together with longtime producer Gary Katz and engineers Roger Nichols and Elliot Scheiner, Becker and Fagen marshalled their (in)famous attention to detail to make Aja their best selling and best sounding release. Aja was Steely Dan’s first platinum album, moving over three million copies and spawning three top-25 singles (“Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” and “Josie”) in the year of Rumours, Saturday Night Fever, and Never Mind the Bollocks — no small feat for a set of intricately crafted, jazz-inflected meditations on nostalgia, mortality, and failure. Aja also quickly became a standard audiophile reference album for testing equipment. As Bowers & Wilkins’s Doug Henderson recently recalled, a common experience for anyone leading an equipment demo at a trade show became “anticipat[ing] the usual Steely Dan requests but want[ing] to avoid looking glum at the umpteenth playing of [Aja’s] ‘Josie’[.]”

     

    The road to Aja began in 1967, when Becker and Fagen met at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. As Fagen remembered, “We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm.” Their experience at Bard also served to heighten Becker and Fagen’s already keenly-developed outsider orientation. “I noticed that everybody had a car, except me and Donald,” Becker said later. “I reluctantly had to conclude that not all socioeconomic groups were equally represented.” 

     

    Like many suburban white kids of their generation, Becker and Fagen admired the black music of the era. But unlike many of their peers this didn’t draw Becker and Fagen into the often-derivative white blues-rock milieu. Instead, Becker and Fagen blended their love of Howlin’ Wolf and Duke Ellington with influences as diverse as the Great American Songbook, Dylan, “Brother Ray,” and Leiber and Stoller to create a singular sonic amalgam that had as much in common with the hermetic studio creations of Todd Rundgren and Stevie Wonder, the cynical singer-songwriting of Randy Newman and Warren Zevon, or the glistening pop-funk of Earth, Wind & Fire (whom Dan aficionado Pharrell Williams once dubbed “the black Steely Dan”) as with their supposed “jazz rock” peers like Weather Report and Chicago. (“I’m not interested in a rock/jazz fusion,” Becker told Rolling Stone in 1974. “That kind of marriage has so far only come up with ponderous results. We play rock and roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.”)

     

    Becker and Fagen combined this unique musical mélange with a love of “W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman,” as Fagen put it, to create songs that were as lyrically obtuse as they were musically complex. “I’ll tell you what I like about our group,” Fagen said in a mid-‘70s interview. “What I like about us, outside of our technical accomplishments, is that our music scares me more than anybody else’s. The combination of the words with the music — like a cheerful lyric and a sad or a menacing melody, or vice versa — I find that irony frightening…. Not music about doom and melodrama — that kind of stuff isn’t really frightening. What’s really frightening is mediocrity. The mediocrity of everyday life, the mediocrity we see around us. That frightens me.” 

     

    The “frightening” irony of Steely Dan’s lyrics wasn’t lost on those listening closely, even if it was missed by many casual fans. “Steely Dan [was] a group who served as the house band for every 1978 West Coast singles bar,” writer Chuck Klosterman quipped, “despite being more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined.” As with Dylanologists, the elisions in and obscurantism of Becker and Fagen’s lyrics would send dedicated Dan-o-philes scurrying to decode their meaning. “We don’t construct them as puzzles,” Fagen claimed to Rolling Stone in 1977. “We try to tell a big story in a very short period of time. Naturally we have to exclude some information. We don’t discourage any speculation.” Nonetheless, Becker and Fagen were loath to explain their songs to interviewers, preferring to allow conjecture to run rampant. 

     

    Both musically and lyrically, Becker and Fagen’s songwriting partnership was a true collaboration. “I usually come up with germinal musical idea, and then we will arrange to meet…,” Fagen told the New York Times. “t is really a collaboration. It’s not one of us writing the music, the other lyrics. And it’s not like Lennon and McCartney, who as I understand it usually just wrote a song by themselves and then put both their names on it. It is a collaboration: we think very much the same musically. I can start songs and Walter can finish them.”

     

    The songwriting duo took their first serious stab at making a career of it when they left Bard and moved to New York City, harboring hopes of becoming Brill Building-style songwriters. Save for placing a tune with Barbara Streisand that was “altered beyond the point where we would have to take responsibility for it,” according to Becker, Becker and Fagen’s efforts were largely fruitless. But their songwriting impressed Kenny Vance of Jay and the Americans (whom Becker and Fagen sometimes backed on the road) and Katz, who landed Becker and Fagen jobs as staff writers for ABC Records in Los Angeles. 

     

    Eventually, Becker and Fagen’s continued inability to write tunes suitable for other artists (“We’re not particularly good popular-song writers,” Fagen explained to one interviewer) led to the realization that they were the only ones who could perform their songs. So, with Becker on bass and guitar, Fagen on keyboards and vocals, Denny Dias and Jeff Baxter on guitar, and Jim Hodder on drums, Steely Dan — a name borrowed from a dildo in William Burroughs Naked Lunch — was born. 

     

    Steely Dan’s debut, Can't Buy a Thrill, was released in November 1972 and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard pop album charts, buoyed by top-20 singles “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.” Dan followed Can’t Buy a Thrill with Countdown to Ecstasy in July 1973, which peaked at number 35 on the charts, and Pretzel Logic in February 1974, which peaked at number eight. The former featured a minor hit about their time at Bard, “My Old School,” and latter spawned their biggest single, “Rikki Don't Lose That Number, which reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100.

     

    Despite Steely Dan’s success, the bookish and mordant Becker and Fagen couldn’t have had less in common with the charismatic and photogenic duos (Page and Plant, Jagger and Richards) behind the early-‘70s other big acts. Indeed, the era’s music press seemed to take great joy in describing Becker and Fagen’s appearance in the least flattering terms possible.

     

    Rolling Stone, 1974:

     

    [Becker] wears smoked glasses, accenting a somewhat gnomish face marked by high cheekbones and an upswitched nose. He has the fool, slouched posture and crooked, potentially menacing smile of somebody who was probably a sarcastic outcast in junior high school. Donald Fagen…has [the] pinched rectangular face of his photos, which…in person turns out to be dominated by an alarmingly long nose, wide mouth and high forehead, giving him the aspect, perhaps, of a mad scientist.

     

    The New York Times, 1977: 

     

    [Fagen] looks like Victor Mature reflected in a funhouse mirror that widens and elongates. He speaks in a slow, laconic New Jersey drawl (he was born in Passaic), and when his wide mouth smiles, the grin resembles a sneer…. Walter Becker is the fast talker and wisecracker. A small slender New Yorker, longhaired with a wispy moustache and beard, he looks like Peter Pan impersonating Fu Manchu.

     

    When music journalist-turned-director Cameron Crowe — who also colorfully described Becker and Fagen’s looks in his ’74 Rolling Stone profile of the band — had one of the groupie characters in his 2000 film Almost Famous proclaim “Wow, they’re cute” while watching the Steely Dan play “Reelin’ in the Years” on “Midnight Special,” it was unambiguously understood as a punch line.

     

    By the mid-1970s, Becker and Fagen’s evident discomfort in the spotlight was fracturing Steely Dan as a functional unit. With each succeeding album, Becker and Fagen’s desire to tour decreased and their desire to use studio musicians to augment (and, eventually, supplant) the band’s other members increased. “The situation just sort of evolved into having a band and making records with them…,” Fagen explained. “But after a couple of records, we decided that the situation was too limited for the kind of music that we were writing, so we arranged to have other musicians brought in. And that finally evolved into a situation where we could hire whomever we wanted to play individual songs.”

     

    The band played its last live date in July 1974 and the original lineup dissolved, leaving Becker and Fagen as the only two full-time members of Steely Dan. By 1975’s Katy Lied, Steely Dan was Fagen and Becker augmented by Los Angeles’s top studio musicians, including Chuck Rainey (who’d already recorded with Yusef Lateef, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, and Aretha Franklin) on bass and Jeff Porcaro (who would go on to record with Boz Scaggs, Hall and Oates, Jackson Browne, Pink Floyd, and Aretha Franklin) on drums. (Dias, who nominally remained Steely Dan’s third member, played on only one of Katy Lied’s tracks.)

     

    Becker and Fagen’s increasing use of studio musicians in the pursuit technical virtuosity was matched by their growing desire for sonic perfection, aided by Katz and Nichols. “I think one of the best things about rock and roll as opposed to jazz is precision and a professional sound,” Fagen said in ‘77. “That’s what I like about popular music. We strive for that sort of slick sound.” A side effect of the band’s embrace of “slickness” was that Becker and Fagen became the poster boys for the “L.A. Sound,” even though they had little use for their adopted home city. (“I don’t love L.A. particularly,” Fagen lamented in 1974. “I mean, it’s comfortable to live here, but you know they’ve got it all set up so you never see any poor people? You never have to drive through Watts, say. When we moved out here, after a while we realized we hadn’t seen any black people — it really stuck out. ‘Where’d half the people go?’”)

     

    By design, each succeeding Steely Dan album seemed to sound better than the last. “The strive for true hi-fi was common ground with Donald and Walter and Gary — we’re all perfectionists, especially Walter with his quad electrostatic speakers at home and the latest tone arm,” Nichols told Dan biographer Brian Sweet in 1993. When a mishap with the new DBX noise-reduction system damaged the Katy Lied tapes, the band undertook herculean efforts to fix the snafu and were devastated when the album’s original fidelity couldn’t be completely restored. (Katz: “I can’t listen to it. I hate to hear an album that we’re involved in that’s not up to our standards. It was the best-sounding thing I ever heard before it was ruined.” Becker: “If you had heard that album the way it originally went down on tape, you would have heard something else.”) But a sonic debacle by Steely Dan standards was still audiophile quality for its time. “It is a testimony to their studio prowess that the ‘flawed’ sound on Katy Lied is still much advanced compared to any of the competition,” Crowe mused in his ’77 piece. 

     

    Despite the sonic advances of Katy Lied and 1976’s The Royal Scam (which took more than three months and over $100,000 to record), Steely Dan’s commercial prospects had dimmed since they stopped touring. Both albums charted lower than Pretzel Logic, as did each album’s most successful single. (“Black Friday” from Katy Lied reached number 37, and “The Fez” from The Royal Scam peaked at 59.)

     

    Aja would change all that. 

     

    Becker and Fagen began recording Aja in Los Angeles in January 1977. It would mark the apotheosis of their quest for studio perfection. “I thought Aja itself was dangerously ambitious,” Becker told Musician magazine in 1981. “I really did.” 

     

    Aja required a budget that made The Royal Scam’s look like “chicken feed” and took longer to record than any previous Steely Dan album, even though with only seven cuts — “Black Cow,” “Aja,” “Deacon Blues,” “Peg,” “Home at Last,” “I Got the News,” and “Josie” — it contain the fewest songs of any Dan album. (It didn’t help that only one of the cuts clocked in at less than four minute and two clocked in at over seven.) Most of that time was spent on endless attempts at the same parts. When Crowe asked Becker and Fagen how they spent their days, Becker quipped: “Overdubbing. We overdubbed a lot of the overdubs over.” “Yeah, we did,” Fagen added.

     

    “We just kept adjusting our standards higher and higher,” Becker explained to GQ in 2014. “So many days we’d make guys do 30 or 40 takes and never listen to any of them again, because we knew none of them were any good. But we just kept hoping that somehow it was just going to miraculously get good.”

     

    “Every track, every overdub, had to be the perfect overdub,” Scheiner told Newsweek in 2017. “They didn’t settle for anything. They were always looking for the perfect.

     

    As a result of their snowballing perfectionism and unlimited access to L.A.’s top players, Becker and Fagen’s own musical role on Aja diminished. “It wouldn’t bother me at all not to play on my own album,” Becker told Crowe with utter seriousness. 

     

    “Around the time we made Aja we figured out what it was we sort of wanted to do, you know, musically,” Fagen explained in the Aja episode of the Classic Albums series. “We realized we needed session musicians who had a larger palette of things they could do.” 

     

    “Donald and I had more of an idea that comes from an East Coast Brill Building tradition, of an almighty producer, when you had a Leiber and Stoller, or at its extreme a Phil Spector, who knew exactly what they wanted,” Becker elaborated in 2000. “What Burt Bacharach did with Dionne Warwick. He was looking for a diva to front his outfit and found her singing in a gospel group in New Jersey. His music was very difficult, and he needed someone who could execute what he was looking for.”

     

    Becker and Fagen could be tough taskmasters in pursuit of their idea of perfection. “They are the most demanding group of people in the industry that I’ve worked for,” guitarist Larry Carlton, whom Becker and Fagen trusted to write many of their arrangements, told the Times in ’77. “Nothing goes with flutter on it. If three of the guys are cutting the part great and one doesn’t feel just right, they’ll call in a whole new band and redo the whole thing.” 

     

    But according to Katz, there was a method to their madness. “I was always amazed that they pretty much heard in their heads what it was gonna be like completely…,” Nichols said in the Classic Albums episode. “[A]ll through the project, they would know, ‘Nope, that’s not it. That’s not working. This what I want.’ And it was amazing that, when the thing got done, finally I could see what everything was gonna be like. But they knew from the very beginning.”

     

    On Aja, Becker and Fagen integrated their diverse musical influences more effortlessly than ever before. As Winston Cook-Wilson gushed in his Spin piece on Aja’s 40th anniversary:

     

    Guitars provided auxiliary punctuation and effects-less solos rather than the brunt of the song; a stew of acoustic piano and electric keyboards, reminiscent of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, were at the warm center of the mix. Aja’s sound was a direct offshoot from jazz and fusion, steeped in its harmonic language, as well as that of turn-of-the-century modernist classical music (Debussy and Stravinsky, especially). The particular musical syntax on Aja was in many ways uniquely Dan’s, however, the misbegotten result of Becker and Fagen’s own self-taught musical education. Their chordal sense was central to the issue: The complex changes left the average rock listeners’ ear out in the cold, pointing toward whole new keys for choruses and away from easy resolution.

     

    The musical complexity of Aja spawned academic studies of Steely Dan’s chord changes and prompted a Berklee College of Music songwriting course analyzing Becker and Fagen’s oeuvre. (For those interested in a slightly less academic, but no less detailed, analysis of the musical and lyrical intricacies of Aja, pianist Don Breithaupt’s short book on the album for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series is highly recommended.)

     

    Aja works so well together as a whole that singling out individual songs seems almost perverse. However, “Deacon Blues,” “Aja,” and “Peg” are not only among the album’s highlights, but also illustrate some of the musical and lyrical elements that make Aja so special. 

     

    For two lyricists who shied away from songs that allowed for easy interpretation, “Deacon Blues” was surprisingly clear and direct. “Deacon Blues is about as close to autobiography as our tunes get,” Fagen admitted in the Classic Albums episode. 

     

    The song’s protagonist is man of presumably advancing age (Becker called him “a broken man living a broken life,” though Fagen has sometimes referred to him as a “kid”) who looks at his staid suburban life and longs to throw it all away in order to play saxophone in dive bars, even if the ultimate price is death. “You call me a fool, You say it's a crazy scheme / This one’s for real, I already bought the dream,” he argues with his skeptical partner (or, perhaps, his own better judgment). “So useless to ask me why, Throw a kiss and say goodbye / I'll make it this time, I'm ready to cross that fine line / Learn to work the saxophone, I play just what I feel / Drink Scotch whiskey all night long, And die behind the wheel.” 

     

    It’s a pipe dream, and the protagonist knows it. He can’t even play the saxophone. “The protagonist is not a musician,” Becker explained. “He just sort of imagines that would be one of the mythic forms of loserdom to which he might aspire. And you know, who’s to say that he’s not right?”

     

    With “Deacon Blues,” Becker and Fagen narrated not only their own pre-Steely Dan lives (and what may have remained their lives had Katz never gotten them their ABC gig), but also the lives of many of their fans, for whom Steely Dan’s music provided the same dreams of escape that the songs on late-night jazz and R&B radio stations once provided to Becker and Fagen. “You know we were both kids who grew up in the suburbs,” Fagen said. “We both felt fairly alienated. Like a lot of kids in the ‘50s we were looking for some kind of alternative culture — some kind of escape, really — from where we found ourselves.”

     

    For the protagonist of “Deacon Blues,” as for Becker and Fagen, that alienation isn’t something to be lamented; it’s something to be embraced. “I think that a lot of kids our age were very alienated,” Becker explained of “Deacon Blues” in a revealing 2008 interview. “To this day when I read some text that somebody writes about alienation, I always think to myself, Gee, they make it sound like it’s a bad thing!” For Becker and Fagen, alienation was the fulcrum around which their discovery of music revolved. “[The protagonist] turns to jazz and hip culture as something to grab on to,” Fagen told Sweet. “And the basic idea is that there’s a kind of culture of losers that he’d rather be part of than the general way of life in America.”

     

    Ultimately, “Deacon Blues” is a tribute to the other working- and middle-class kids like Becker and Fagen who, through music and the entire “alterative culture” that comes with it, learned to reject the façade of the American Dream and embrace their outsider status, even if they remained “losers” by the standards of the kids who drove “Porsches and Jaguars” around the college campus. “You know, they’ve got a name for the winners in the world, and the losers should have some sort of franchise as well,” Fagen has explained. “And the name that he has chosen that conveys a certain power is ‘Deacon Blues.’” (Becker and Fagen landed on the name for the winners, “Crimson Tide,” by asking former tour manager Warren Wallace for the names of successful college football teams and choosing the University of Alabama’s moniker.)

     

    Musically, “Deacon Blues” is marked by Carlton’s supple rhythm guitar, saxophonist Tom Scott’s hypnotic horn arrangement, and Pete Christlieb’s improvised sax solo. “They just told me to play what I felt…,” Christlieb told the Wall Street Journal. “[So I] recorded my first solo. We listened back and they said it was great. I recorded a second take and that’s the one they used. I was gone in a half-hour. The next thing I know I’m hearing myself in every airport bathroom in the world.”

     

    Christlieb also solos over the song’s slow fadeout, which stretches over 30 seconds. “The song’s fade-out at the end was intentional,” Fagen said in 2015. “We used it to make the end feel like a dream fading off into the night.”

     

    Becker and Fagen refused to edit out Cristlieb’s solo to shorten the seven-plus minute cut to more suitable single length. ABC released it anyhow, and it became a top-20 hit despite its length. 

     

    “‘Deacon Blues’ was special for me,” Becker marveled years later. “It’s the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again. It was the comprehensive sound of the thing: the song itself, its character, the way the instruments sounded and the way Tom Scott’s tight horn arrangement fit in.”

     

    While the meaning of “Deacon Blues” is fairly straightforward, the cryptic “Aja” has been meticulously dissected by writers and fans. In the Classic Album episode, Fagen calls “Aja” “a journey in space and time…[about] the sort of tranquility that can come of a quiet relationship with a beautiful woman.” 

     

    Musically, “Aja” is an example of how Becker and Fagen’s pairing of studio musicians could result in spontaneous magic. The song’s highlight is the interlocking solo by saxophonist Wayne Shorter — who had played on innumerable classics by Miles Davis and Art Blake but who usually eschewed pop music — and New York session drummer Steve Gadd. 

     

    “The title song I like…,” Becker told Sounds magazine in 1977. “We’d gotten this drummer we didn’t know but had heard a lot about, named Steve Gadd…. We had a chart for the tune, and it was like eight pages long — three music stands in front of every musician. What’s on the charts is very specific for some of the players…but very open for others…particularly the drummer — he really had to outdo himself on that one.”

     

    “There was a little mark on the chart for Steve Gadd to ad-lib through a certain part and add a couple of different parts that we figured we’d talk about [after the initial takes] and so on,” Fagen explained to Sweet, “but [Gadd] just ripped right through it on the first take and we kept it.”

     

    Gadd’s tempestuous solo has become legendary among drummers, who’ve dissected its every nuance (including a beloved stick click near the five-minute mark that has generated much debate — intentional or accidental?). Shorter’s biographer Michelle Mercer also credits Gadd for helping to inspire Shorter’s equally legendary solo, which she calls “majestic and stately, tracing a mountainous arc with cleverly displaced references back to the vocal melody.”

     

    If the solo on “Aja” illustrated the magic of first takes, the solo on “Peg” demonstrated how Becker and Fagen’s willingness to overdub (and overdub and overdub) with different musicians could also yield transcendent results. 

     

    “Peg” was the last tune recorded for Aja, cut in New York while the rest of the record was being mixed. The tight, infectious groove laid down by Rainey and drummer Rick Marotta was almost automatic. “We had done stuff with them before so we knew what to expect,” Marotta said. “Chuck and I had played together so much that we got into a groove… [Y]ou could have hung a coat up on the groove.” (In the process of laying down that groove, Rainey smartly defied Becker and Fagen’s instructions not to play slap bass by erecting a studio partition so that they couldn’t see that he was slapping.)

     

    The guitar solo on what Becker and Fagen called a “pantonal 13-bar blues with chorus” didn’t come nearly as easily. “[‘Peg’] I think is infamous among studio players in that we hired a couple guitar players to play the solo,” Fagen said in the Classic Albums episode, “and it wasn’t quite what we were looking for until we got through three or four, five...six or seven, eight players.”

     

    They tried Elliott Randall, who’d played the “Reelin’ in the Years” solo, along with former McCoy’s frontman Rick Derringer, who’d played on Countdown to Ecstasy and Katy Lied. But Becker and Fagen weren’t happy with the results. 

     

    “Rick Derringer was there for about three or four hours,” remembered Scheiner. “We got something out of him. The minute he left, Walter looked at me and said, ‘Erase it.’ I said, ‘OK.’ You never questioned it. You didn’t say, ‘Come on, really?’ It was over.

     

    “We were embarrassed for them and for us,” Fagen admitted to Breithaupt. “We felt silly spending all this money for this one brief blues solo.”

     

    They finally brought in L.A. session guitarist Jay Graydon, who’d played on albums by Marvin Gaye, Joe Cocker, and Wayne Shorter. 

     

    “I found out I was the seventh guy. For about an hour and a half, I’m playing my hip, melodic kind of jazz style. Then Donald says to me, ‘Naw, man. Try to play the blues.’… [So] I play bluesy for a while. I get melodic for a while. I get bluesy again. Then I get melodic and bluesy,” Graydon told Newsweek in 2017. “The whole thing probably took about four, five hours…. When I walked out of the studio at the end of the night, I didn't know it was a keeper. I turned the radio on one day, and there it is.” (As Aja’s first single, Peg” was all over the radio in 1977, reaching number 11 on the Billboard charts during its 19-week run.)

     

    While “Deacon Blues,” “Aja,” and “Peg” are some of my favorites, deep cuts like “Home at Last” (which Fagen called “a little blues about Ulysses”) are just as good. And if you read Breithaupt’s book or watch the Classic Albums documentary, it becomes clear that every song on Aja has a compelling story, because every note and every word was intentional.

     

    “An album like Aja matters not just because it contributes to civilization a handful of date-stamped audio treasures, but because it puts into sharp relief the dreck that surrounds it,” according to Breithaupt. “How else to know the true banality of ‘Come Sail Away,’ ‘Hot Legs,’ and ‘Three Times a Lady’ (all of which shared chart space with songs from Aja)?”

     

    With the fanatically pursued perfection of Aja, Becker and Fagen exposed the “mediocrity” that so terrified Fagen. That’s why it’s worth it for true Dan-o-philes to pursue the perfect digital version or Aja — or as close to it as we can get. 

     

    The digital mastering history of Aja is complex, the differences between the masterings are notable, and debate on the interwebs about which is the best has been particularly heated.  

     

    But the basic story is that there have been (at least)1 seven digital masterings of Aja: 1) a 1984 CD mastered by Steve Hoffman, 2) a 1984 CD mastered by Nichols, 3) a 1984 Japanese CD with uncertain mastering credits, 4) a 1988 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab CD remaster, 5) a 1993 remaster by Glenn Meadows found on the Citizen Steely Dan CD box set, 6) a 1999 CD remaster by Nichols, and 7) a 2010 “flat transfe[r] from Japan[ese] original analogue master tapes” by Hitoshi Takiguchi at Tokyo’s Universal Music Studios, used for both a 2010 SACD and several subsequent CDs

     

    Aja’s path to digital began years before the first CD release of the album. 

     

    With the help and encouragement of Nichols, Becker and Fagen had been early adopters of digital technology in the studio. (They deployed “Wendel,” Nichols’s pioneering digital sampler for drums on 1980’s Gaucho.) Nichols was just as enthusiastic about the possibilities of digital for home audio. As Nichols wrote 1991: 

     

    I originally got involved in recording music because I hated clicks and pops on record. I figured that the only way that I was going to get good quality recordings to play was to record them myself. I could then bring home two-track 15 ips copies to play on my stereo…. When the Compact Disc became a reality, I was beside myself. I was also close by the side of any record company exec who could get me any discs to play on my new found CD player. Since CDs preserved all the characteristics of the original master tape, I could now enjoy music without the drawbacks of black vinyl.

     

    Not surprisingly, Nichols was proactive in preparing the Steely Dan catalog for CD release. 

     

    According to Nichols and ICE magazine, in either 1981 or 1982, Nichols transferred all of the Steely Dan master tapes to Scotch 3M digital tape, with the intention that these digital flat transfers, not the original analog masters (which Nichols later said “were in terrible shape, due to improper storage, and had poor fidelity”), would be used for subsequent CD releases. (Notably, the master tape for the b-side of Aja could not be found, and a tape copy was used for the digital transfer.) 

     

    However, the source of the '80s CD version(s) of Aja are shrouded in mystery.

     

    According to mastering engineer Steve Hoffman, when it came time to master Aja for its first CD release, Hoffman mastered it at Bruce Botnick’s Digital Magnetics studio in Hollywood from the original analog tape, not Nichols’s digital transfer. According to Hoffman, the Aja master tape “sounded quite dull” and had a “midrange suckout problem,” which he attributed to it being mixed on horn speakers that exaggerated the midrange. So, Hoffman’s mastering “fill[ed] in the midrange hole” by boosting the mids a bit, but was otherwise a flat transfer of the analog master. 


    In Hoffman's telling, MCA pressed around 5,000 CDs with Hoffman’s mastering, but as many as 4,000 of them were destroyed when the band decided they wanted Nichols to have control of their CD releases. While Hoffman’s mastering wasn’t supposed to be released, he says that some nonetheless eventually found their way into stores. 

     

    Mastering engineer Glenn Meadows, who worked with Nichols and the band on subsequent CD releases, told me that the '80s CDs produced by the band also came from the analog masters. These masters were transferred to digital tape on Sony PCM 1600 system, which was the preferred format for sending to CD pressing plants. According to Meadows, it was only after these masters — which Meadows attributes to both Nichols and famed mastering engineer Bob Ludwig were prepared that Nichols made the flat transfers of the original master tapes to the 3M digital tape format, and it's those 3M tapes that both Meadows and Nichols used for their respective '90s CD masterings. (For more on this confusing story, see my October 2021 update below an update that calls into question the existence of both an '80s Nichols mastering and a Hoffman mastering.)

     

    How do what are commonly referred to as Nichols's '80s mastering and Hoffman's '80s mastering compare? On a few tracks, Nichols’s mastering differs little from Hoffman’s. But on most tracks, Nichols’s ’84 mastering has more upper-midrange and treble than Hoffman’s, leading to a brighter sound, as the GIF below comparing Nichols’s (light blue) and Hoffman’s (purple) masterings of “Aja,” “Deacon Blues,” “Home at Last,” and “Peg” using Har-Bal’s “average power” graphs demonstrates:

     

     

     

    Hoffman%20vs%2084%20Nichols%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Despite the significant differences in sound, it’s difficult to visually distinguish Hoffman-mastered ‘84 CDs from Nichols-mastered ‘84 CDs, since the liner notes don’t list the mastering engineer. But online sleuths have gone to great lengths to figure out which CDs contain the Nichols mastering and which contain the Hoffman mastering based on catalog and matrix numbers. 

     

    Making matters more complicated, there’s also a mastering on some ’84 Japanese CDs that’s neither Hoffman’s nor Nichols’s. (Thankfully, it’s easy to identify by its catalog number.) This Japanese mastering is overall more similar to Hoffman’s mastering than the Nichols’s, but it’s much more midrange-focused than Hoffman’s mastering, as the GIF below comparing Hoffman’s mastering (purple) to the Japanese mastering (pink) shows:

     

     

     

    Hoffman%20vs%2084%20Japan%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    The next digital release of Aja came in 1988, when Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab released a new mastering of the album sourced from the original analog masters (a fact that irked Nichols). As the GIF below shows, the MFSL mastering (orange) has more high-end and low-end, but less midrange, than Hoffman’s mastering (purple):

     

     

     

    Hoffman%20vs%20MFSL%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    In 1993, Steely Dan released the Citizen Steely Dan box set, which featured new masterings of the band’s entire catalog by Glenn Meadows. Meadows’s remasters were sourced from Nichols’s 1982 digital tapes. According to Meadows, he was instructed to “pretend you’ve never heard the albums before and do what you feel appropriate” and given an almost open-ended time frame from Nichols and the band to put together the box.

     

    “Processing included all digital EQ/compression signal processing,” Meadows told me via email. “Also, several functions of CEDAR was used. On the older albums, a light processing of De-Noise was applied. This was used in conjunction with the EQ processing so that when the noise was removed, there was also no loss of hi-end (a typical false accusation about CEDAR — the reality is an overly aggressive application of the process). The final CEDAR process was their ‘Phase Correction’…. This was a subtle improvement, but was obvious when taken in and out of the signal path.”

     

    According to Meadows, his Citizen Steely Dan mastering was approved by Nichols and the band with no changes.

     

    Ultimately, Meadows’s mastering of Aja (which is unfortunately split across two CDs on the box) differed little from Nichols’s ’84 CDs, aside from less tape hiss and a little more treble on a few songs, as can be seen in the GIF below comparing Meadows’s Citizen mastering (dark green) with Nichols’s ’84 mastering (light blue):

     

     

     

    Citizen%20vs%2084%20Nichols%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Ever frustrated with how the Steely Dan catalog sounded on CD, Nichols began remastering the entire catalog yet again in the late-1990s with the intention of creating the “definitive” Steely Dan CD releases. These CDs were once again sourced from his 1982 digital transfers. Interestingly, however, Nichols’s new mastering of Aja (dark blue), which was released in 1999, was nearly identical to Meadows’s Citizen mastering (green), aside from a slight volume difference:

     

     

     

    Citizen%20vs%20Nichols%2099%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Nichols’s 1999 remaster of Aja remained the last word on the album until 2010, when a new Japanese SACD featuring a “flat transfe[r] from Japan[ese] original analogue master tapes” by Hitoshi Takiguchi was released. From the release’s description, it’s not clear whether the tape used for this release was the U.S. master tape, a Japanese copy of the master tape, or even an EQ’d “cutting master.” But Takiguchi’s mastering (red) differs from all previous masterings, being slightly less bass-centric than Hoffman’s (purple), but not nearly as bright as the Nichols or Meadows masterings, as midrange focused as the previous Japanese mastering, or as “scooped” in the midrange as the MFSL mastering:

     

     

     

    Hoffman%20vs%2013%20Japan%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Evaluating the different Aja masterings is easily the most difficult task I’ve tackled in a TBVO column so far. 

     

    None can be easily dismissed based on a lack of dynamics. Whether measured by crest factor DR score or R128 dynamic range, all of the masterings have very similar dynamics, registering a DR score between 13 and 15 and an R128 between 6.5 and 7.9 dB. The 1999 Nichols remaster is ever so slightly less dynamic according to DR score (12), but slightly more dynamic according to R128 (8.0 dB). Likewise, the Takiguchi mastering is somewhat more dynamic than the 1999 Nichols remaster (and in line with the previous masterings) according to DR score (13), but is the least dynamic according to R128 (5.0 dB). 

     

    Ultimately, none of the masterings can be considered overly compressed or “brickwalled.” A comparison of the waveforms of the Hoffman mastering (purple) and the Takiguchi mastering (red) shows that the latter is slightly louder and has ever so slightly shorter peaks, but is far from compressed2:

     

     

     

    Waveform%20-%20Hoffman%20vs%2013%20Japan

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    There’s a better case for throwing out some of the masterings due to technical flaws. 

     

    Overall fidelity is not the issue, despite the constant kerfuffle over whether the analog masters or Nichols’s digital transfers should be used, debates about noise reduction, and uncertainty about what tape was used for the Japanese remaster. While the Citizen Steely Dan box and Nichols’s 1999 remaster have less tape noise on songs like “Home at Last” (and Meadows is correct that the noise reduction is mostly tasteful), the noise level isn’t an issue on any of the CDs sourced from the analog tapes. With very close listening on the most resolving gear, there are small differences in clarity between the various versions that seem to go beyond fact that each mastering’s EQ emphasizes different details.3 I’ll get to these differences later, but overall the level of clarity on each CD clears the bar to keep them in contention. 

     

    Some masterings, however, possess notable glitches. Masterings sourced from Nichols’s 1982 digital transfer — including Nichols’s original ‘84 mastering, the Citizen Steely Dan box, and Nichols’s ‘99 remaster — have several bursts of noise in the left channel near the 2:18 mark of “I Got the News.” There’s also a click in the left channel near the 1:03 mark of “Black Cow.” These don’t appear in any of the versions sourced from analog tapes, including the Hoffman, ’84 Japan, MoFi, and Takiguchi masterings. The Mobile Fidelity CD has its own glitch, too. Near the 2:10 mark of the title track, the sound stage shifts slightly. This is more noticeable on headphones than speakers, and it might just be a case of one of the many edits in the song being more apparent on the MFSL than on other masterings. 

     

    In my view, the “I Got the News” error is reason enough to remove both Nichols masterings and the Citizen Steely Dan mastering from the running. But there are also other reasons to do so that raise fundamental questions about what makes for a definitive mastering, questions that thus far haven’t been explicitly addressed in TBVO: Is the best mastering the one that (subjectively) sounds best to the listener, the one that reflects the sound of the master tape, the one that captures the intent of the artist, or the one that sounds like what listeners heard when it was first released?

     

    I would argue that, by necessity, the first question trumps the others, but doesn’t render them obsolete. We rarely know the sound of the master tape or the intent of the artist, and it’s sometimes the case that what listeners heard when an album was first released was compromised in one way or another, either due to technical limitations or errors. But when information about the master tape or artist intent is knowable and when the album’s initial release wasn’t marred by poor production or mastering, it’s important to all of those factors take those factors into account, even if we filter them through the somewhat subjective lens of what sounds best to our ears today.


    In the case of Aja, the album’s initial release was regarded as an audiophile masterpiece, and we know a great deal about the band’s intent and a fair amount about the sound of the master tape.  

     

    If one’s ideal mastering is a pure reflection of the master tape, then it’s likely that the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab mastering of Aja is the best choice. The MFSL’s slight midrange dip comports with Hoffman’s description of the master tape and Mobile Fidelity’s reputation for putting out (mostly) flat transfers of the analog master. 

     

    However, Hoffman is right that the album sounds more natural and balanced with some of that missing midrange added back. Moreover, we know that the MFSL’s presentation of Aja, even if it matches the master tape, isn’t how Aja sounded to listeners in 1977 — a sound that made Aja a go-to audiophile test record. 

     

    The original ’77 release of Aja was mastered by Bernie Grundman. I reached out to Grundman, and he explained that Becker and Fagen didn’t simply sign off on his mastering. Rather, Nichols, Becker, and Fagen actively participated “in the mastering session with [Grundman] and [Grundman, Nichols, Becker, and Fagen] did the album together.” 

     

    Given that we know that the initial mastering of Aja both reflected the band’s artistic intent and made Aja an audiophile landmark, it’s worth investigating how the digital masterings compare to the original vinyl Aja.

     

    I was able track down three high resolution digital transfers of original Aja pressings attributed to Grudman. Two of the three — an ABC AB 1006 Santa Maria pressing and a Japanese YX-8114-AB pressing — featured EQ that was remarkably similar according to Har-Bal. They also sounded virtually identical, despite the inherent variation in vinyl pressings and the number of variables that can skew how vinyl sounds, especially in the process of transferring it to digital. Those pressings also happen to be two of vinyl audiophiles’ favorites

     

    Comparing both of Nichols’s masterings and the Citizen Steely Dan mastering — all of which, as noted above, feature very similar EQing — to the vinyl, it’s clear that they’re much brighter sounding than the original mastering that Grundman worked on with Nichols, Becker, and Fagen, as this GIF of the ’84 Nichols mastering (light blue) versus the vinyl (grey) illustrates:

     

     

     

    84%20Nichols%20vs%20Vinyl%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    The ’84 Japanese mastering (pink) is much closer to the vinyl (grey), though it still displays a more midrange-focused, bass-light tonality that’s even more apparent with close listening:

     

     

     

    84%20Japan%20vs%20Vinyl%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Hoffman’s mastering is extremely close to the vinyl on several tracks and more bass-heavy on others:

     

     

     

    Hoffman%20vs%20Vinyl%20GIF.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

     

    Finally, the 2010 Takiguchi mastering (red) is almost identical to the vinyl (grey), further hinting at the possibility that the Japanese tape is a vinyl cutting master:

     

     

     

    13%20Japan%20vs%20Vinyl.gif

    (click on image to see the animated comparison)

     

     

    Taking both the Har-Bal analysis and close listening into account, the Takiguchi and Hoffman CDs are closest to the original vinyl’s EQ, with the Takiguchi being slightly, but notably, closer on several tracks. One of the most significant differences, for example, comes on “Deacon Blues.” Hoffman’s master has more low-end, which tends to make it sound slightly bloated on some gear, relative to the original vinyl or the Takiguchi mastering.

     

    However, the slight, but undeniable difference in fidelity mentioned earlier favors the Hoffman mastering.4 Likely due to Hoffman’s use of the original U.S. master tape, as opposed to the Japanese tape copy, the Hoffman mastering sounds clearer and more three-dimensional when played on resolving gear. Gadd’s floor tom strikes in the right channel of “Aja,” to cite one example, sound more resonant and lifelike on the Hoffman mastering. The same is true for Rainey’s bass on “Peg,” despite the fact that the song’s equalization on the Hoffman and Takiguchi CDs is nearly identical.

     

    The crown in the third installment of TBVO, then, is a near-tie between the Hoffman mastering of Aja and the Takiguchi mastering of Aja. A slight EQ edge goes to Takiguchi, but the fidelity edge goes to Hoffman, giving the Hoffman the overall win by a small margin.

     

    If you want the absolute best digital mastering of Aja, try to get your hands on a Hoffman CD (or one of its “clones”)5. But the recent Japanese CDs and SACDs with the Takiguchi mastering are also an excellent choice. 

     

    Whichever version of Aja you pick up, our grotesquely cartoonish historical moment is the perfect time to listen to some Steely Dan (preferably on a nice set of speakers or pair of headphones). As Dan Moffett put it in his meditation on how he became a Dan-o-phile, “The more absurd life gets, the more sense Steely Dan makes sense.”

     

     

    UPDATE FEBRUARY 25, 2019

     

    Thanks to @EmmettM , who mailed the disc to me, I was able to hear the 2018 MQA CD of Aja. While I remain dubious about MQA as a format, I’m happy to report that the mastering on the disc is excellent. 

     

    The MQA CD is billed as a “flat transfe[r] from US original analogue master tapes by Eli Brown at Universal Music Studios, LA, in 2018.” Its fidelity seems to bear out this claim. In terms of detail, depth, and noise floor, the MQA disc is closer to the Hoffman mastering than the Takiguchi mastering. 

     

    EQ-wise, the MQA CD is very slightly bass-shy relative to the Hoffman and Takiguchi masterings on a few tracks. But, overall, it’s very close to both of those masterings, as well as the original vinyl, as the GIF below — which rotates through several tracks on the MQA CD (faint pink), the Hoffman CD (purple), the Takiguchi CD (red), and the original vinyl (grey) — shows:

     

     

    MQA-Comparison-GIF.gif

     

     

    All things considered, I’d now move the MQA CD into second place behind the Hoffman CD but slightly ahead of the Takiguchi mastering, thanks to the MQA CD’s slightly superior fidelity. 
     

     

    UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2021

     

    As if the story of Steely Dan’s Aja on CD couldn’t get more complicated, some eagle-eyed fans – “Paul P” and “strippies” – over at the Steve Hoffman Forums (SHF) have sussed out some new wrinkles in the saga. (Start reading here if you’d like to follow the conversation yourself.)

     

    Before we dive into the new information, let’s back up.

     

    According to the sources cited in my TBVO, both Roger Nichols’s first mastering of Aja and Steve Hoffman’s only mastering of Aja made their way onto CDs in the 1980s. Since this information came from credible contemporary sources and has been widely repeated in the years since, I took it for granted in writing my TBVO.

     

    However, the aforementioned SHF members have raised an intriguing third possibility: That what I’ve identified in my TBVO as the ‘80s Nichols mastering is, in fact, an early-‘90s mastering by Glenn Meadows. This supposition is based on something Meadows wrote that I overlooked. Let’s review some of what Meadows said:

     

    The story actually starts at the original transfer of the analog masters to CD. At that time, the CD masters were initially prepped/mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk in NYC. Many days were spent matching master tapes to different brand analog ¼” machines to get the best transfer possible….It was also realized at that point, that the analog tapes were in VERY poor condition due to continuous use for cutting master lacquers to keep pressing records.

     

    At the end of the mastering, it was also decided to do a 1 pass FLAT transfer of the analog masters (after each album was mastered for CD), would be made to the 3M 4Track digital recorders. This was in the VERY early days of Digital recording. The masters that were created for CD were done with the Sony PCM 1600 system….

     

    Move forward several years…[and] a request for a new set of CD masters was sent to the MCA studios. Not realizing that there were NO copies of the Ludwig created masters in their files, the studios pulled the 15IPS Dolby EQ tape copies, and transferred THOSE tapes to the Sony digital tapes, and sent those to the US plant(s) for replication. Nobody ever compared the US made CD’s to the original CD’s, since it was assumed they were all the same.

     

    Fast forward to mid 1990’s. Roger Nichools is now living in Nashville, and I (Glenn Meadows) have been working with him mastering projects for him. MCA decided to add 4 cuts to the then 8 cut Steely Dan Gold CD. Roger asked for the master tapes be sent to Nashville so that he and I could master the 4 additional cuts and create new CD masters. When the tapes arrived, they were a stack of ¼” analog Dolby copies (see above), as well as the 1 1630 master that was the 8 cut Solid Gold album. Roger realized that they had sent the wrong original album masters had been sent.He made some phone calls and told the MCA vault that they needed to find Sony Digital masters made at Masterdisk, and that they were the correct CD master source tapes. What he subsequently found out, was that the wrong tapes had been used YEARS earlier when production switched to the US. Panic ensued, and Steely Dan management threatened to sue, and MCA stopped all CD manufacture. 

     

    Roger was able to locate the FLAT 3m 4 track masters that were recorded when the fist mastering was done for CD release. Those were sent to me in Nashville, where there is/was still a working set of 3M digital recorders. It was at that point that the re-mastering that later became the box set occurred. All 7 of the CD’s were remastered at that time to update ALL CD releases. Transfers were made from the 3M system for mastering…. Processing included all digital EQ/Compression signal processing. Also, several functions of CEDAR was used. On the older albums, a light processing of De-Noise was applied. This was used in conjunction with the EQ processing so that when the noise was removed, there was also no loss of hi-end (a typical false accusation about CEDAR, the reality is an overly aggressive application of the process)….. That was how all 7 albums were re-mastered, and re-released. The ONLY notation was a sticker that said “Recently Re-Mastered by Artist”….

     

    The [Citizen] box set was simply a re-edit adjusting sequence to match that provided by MCA to fit on 4 CD’s. Since we were about a year and a half later, there were some improvements in the CEDAR system, and there were several tracks that I was unable to completely remove the tape his without having resulting “space monkey” artifacts. With the later version of CEDAR, I was able to successfully remove the last vestiges of the tape hiss.

     

    So, according to Meadows, the original ‘80s Steely Dan CDs were mastered by Ludwig, presumably in conjunction with Nichols. (I’ve made an edit to my TBVO to reflect this.) These CDs were based on new EQ’d masters recorded to Sony PCM 1600 digital tapes and sent to CD pressing plants. Subsequent CD remasters – including the Meadows-mastered Citizen box and Nichols’s 1999-2000 remasters – were based on a flat-transfer of the analog master to 3M digital tape. (I’ve clarified this distinction in my TBVO, too.)

     

    The key claim that I missed in Meadows’s account, which the SHF folks noted, was the story about early-‘90s CD remasters by Meadows, which were only identifiable by a “Recently Re-Mastered by Artist” sticker. Further, the subsequent Citizen box was identical to these CDs, according to Meadows, save for an additional round of noise reduction.

     

    Why does this matter?

     

    It means that what I identified as the ‘80s Nichols mastering may, in fact, be the pre-Citizen Meadows remaster. Like the Citizen box and Nichols’s ’99 remaster, it clearly comes from the 3M tape. As noted in my column, all three have the same glitches, which aren’t present on any of the other CDs. So they all originated from the same digital source. I thought that was because the original ‘80s CDs also came from the 3M tapes. But, according to Meadows, that’s not the case. Further, what I identified as the ‘80s Nichols mastering is incredibly close to the Citizen mastering, differing only slightly (usually in the high end) on some songs. Could this be due to the additional CEDAR processing noted by Meadows? Very possibly. Finally, it’s possible that – despite being identified as 1984 on the artwork – the CD I refer to as the Nichols ‘80s mastering was actually released later if, in fact, the label recycled the ‘80s artwork for Meadows early-‘90s remaster and added only a “Recently Re-Mastered by Artist” on the (long gone) cellophane. 

     

    If the above is true, where does that leave us?

     

    If what I called Nichols’s ’80s mastering is actually Meadow’s early-‘90s pre-Citizen mastering, it means that the common ‘80s mastering I attributed to Hoffman (in line with his own claim) is either the Hoffman mastering or the ‘80s Nichols (with Ludwig, possibly) mastering. Both could not have been released.

     

    Which is the case? I don’t know. The plot thickens. 

     

    UPDATE OCTOBER 12, 2023

     

    When Analogue Productions announced it would be releasing Bernie Grundman-mastered versions of the complete Steely Dan catalog on vinyl and SACD, audiophiles rejoiced. I’ve already evaluated Grundman’s mastering of Can’t Buy a Thrill in a Mini-TBVO on my blog, and I plan to evaluate every AP remaster as part of a mini or full-length TBVO.

     

    For obvious reasons, one of the most anticipated releases in the AP series was Aja. The new mastering began hitting streaming and download sites last week. So it seems like an ideal time to update this TBVO.

     

    Before I begin the analysis, it’s worth praising Analogue Productions for being clear about the source for these remasters. According to AP, the Aja source is an “Analog, Non EQ'd Tape Copy.” However, a puzzling part of the label’s press release is that it claims “[t]here’s no evidence the original tapes containing the flat mixes of Aja and Gaucho were delivered to the record label and it’s presumed the tapes no longer exist.” Why is that puzzling? Because the 2018 MQA-CD’s credits state that it’s a “flat transfe[r] from US original analogue master tapes by Eli Brown at Universal Music Studios, LA, in 2018.” So one of these credits is wrong.

     

    Given the significance of a new Aja mastering from an audiophile label, this analysis will be (much, much) more thorough than most TBVO updates. I’m going to compare Grundman’s new mastering against the top three previous digital versions of Aja.

     

    The 1980s CD mastering widely credited to Steve Hoffman won the original TBVO shootout, narrowly taking the crown over the 2010 SACD credited as a 2010 “flat transfe[r] from Japan[ese] original analogue master tapes” done by engineer Hitoshi Takiguchi. In my February 2019 update, I evaluated the hard-to-find Brown-mastered 2018 MQA-CD of Aja. Back then, I placed Brown’s mastering only slightly behind the CD credited to Hoffman and slightly ahead of Takiguchi’s.

     

    Since that update, my opinion of the Brown mastering has only grown. Plus, I’d like to think that my evaluation methods have only improved since I first wrote the Aja TBVO. Thus, my evaluations here may differ from the original TBVO’s. (Indeed, in some way I wish I’d waited to tackle the endless complexities of Aja until later in my TBVO career.)

     

    Thus, this TBVO update will pit Grudnman’s mastering against Hoffman’s, Takiguchi’s, and Brown’s. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to continue to refer to the 1980s CD that won the original TBVO crown as Hoffman’s mastering. However, as noted in the October 2021 update above, there’s some uncertainty about that conclusion. It may, in fact, be Roger Nichols’s mastering.)

     

    With four masterings in the running, I’ve decided to do what I do in most full-length TBVOs, which is undertake a chronological process-of-elimination showdown. For both the objective and subjective parts of this update, I’ve also included all of the songs from Aja, rather than the smaller sample from my original TBVO. (I told you it would be thorough.) I also significantly dialed up my nitpickiness when it comes to criticizing small flaws.

     

    Most listening was done with a Matrix X-SABRE PRO MQA DAC feeding a Flux FA-10 PRO headphone amp, which was powering Focal Utopia headphones. However, as part of applying the maximum amount of critical listening to these contenders, I also mixed in ZMF’s excellent new closed-back Atrium headphones, the widely-praised Moondrop S8 IEMs, the criminally underrated Sound Rhyme DTE500 EST IEMs, and my speaker setup.

     

    The first matchup is between the Hoffman CD and the Takiguchi SACD. Let’s start by taking a look at how the Hoffman mastering’s equalization (purple) compares to the Takiguchi’s (red) in Har-Bal. As usual, these graphs use level-matched files to make discerning differences easier, and hi-resolution files have been downsampled to Redbook to provide for an apples-to-apples comparison.

     

    Aja - Hoffman vs Takaguchi GIF.gif

     

    Note that the big difference in the subbass makes the scale for this graph relatively large and remember that any differences in the graph need to be multiplied by 10 dBs. That said, compared to what’s believed to be the Hoffman-mastered CD, the Takiguchi-mastered SACD tends to have a little more energy between about 200 Hz and 2 kHz, plus much more energy in the subbass and quite a bit less above about 14 kHz.

     

    On “Black Cow,” the Hoffman CD is much more dynamic, while the Takiguchi SACD’s limiting is, well, limiting. I also noted that the latter shifts the overall soundstage slightly to the left compared to the Hoffman-credited mastering. That said, I noticed a slight fuzziness on the “you were high” on Hoffman’s mastering. Meanwhile, while the Hoffman CD has much more thump on Paul Humphrey’s kick drum, it can tend to skew the tonality of other elements, including his snare, which sounds too tubby. In contrast, the Takiguchi SACD presents his snare with a more pleasant metallic thwack. Likewise, Humphrey’s cymbals are more three-dimensional and less tizzy on the Takiguchi SACD. Perhaps due to the benefit of more recent ADC technology or the more restrained subbass, it’s easier to separate elements in the mix, such as the various vocal layers, on the Takiguchi SACD, too. Overall, it’s tough to pick a winner. The Hoffman CD has better bass and, especially, dynamics, but the Takiguchi SACD has better overall resolution.

     

    Turning to “Aja,” the Hoffman CD has a slightly blacker background, but the Takiguchi SACD projects a better sense of depth. There’s less difference in these two version’s dynamics on this track, but the Hoffman CD retains a slight edge. However, this time it sounds like the Hoffman CD’s soundstage is a bit off, with Fagen’s lead vocal pulled slightly right of center. Keeping with the above pattern, the Takiguchi does a better job of detail retrieval, such as the articulation of Chuck Rainey’s bassline or the separability and realism of Victor Feldman’s wood block, triangle, and shakers. On the other hand, the Hoffman mastering has better thump on Steve Gadd’s kick. Yet again, though, this low-end boost also tends to make other parts of his kit sound too bassy. The soundstage more clearly favors the Hoffman CD, which presents a more wraparound, immersive sonic vision than the relatively flat and somewhat distant Takiguchi SACD. Finally, both Gadd’s drum solo and Wayne Shorter’s sax solo sound more captivating on the Hoffman-credited CD.

     

    Moving on to the stupendous “Deacon Blues,” I noted that the tonal differences of these two masterings are less extreme than on the two previous tracks. The Hoffman mastering projects a taller soundstage. Oddly, though, I noted that its wraparound feel seems skewed towards the left channel on “Deacon Blues.” This tends to pull Bernard Purdie’s snare off to the side, whereas it’s centered on the Takiguchi SACD. Meanwhile, the horns sound much more realistic and separable in the Takiguchi’s presentation, while they tend to blend together on the Hoffman CD. Overall, this is a track where I prefer Takiguchi’s mastering.

     

    “Peg” is another track where I think these two masterings are generally similar in overall tonal balance. But Rick Marotta’s drums are more tonally realistic and three-dimensional on the Takiguchi SACD. In contrast, his snare is more of a flat thwack on the Hoffman CD. Overall resolution also favors Takiguchi’s mastering. The hi-hat and shaker are more realistic, and the backing vocals are easier to separate. On the other hand, the relatively greater prominence accorded to Chuck Rainey’s bass on Hoffman’s CD is appreciated.

     

    On “Home at Last,” the horns are both more three-dimensional and easier to separate on the Takiguchi SACD. The same is true for most other instruments. However, I still prefer the bass on Hoffman CD, and its surround soundstage pulls you in. The combination of those two factors makes elements like Purdie’s tom rolls much more dramatic. It also helps that Hoffman’s edge in dynamics is very apparent on this track.

     

    With “I Got the News,” I could basically copy and paste my observations about “Home at Last.” Do you prefer masterings that prioritize the resolution of the individual instruments (Takiguchi) or masterings that emphasize dynamics and overall immersion (Hoffman). Things like cymbals, horns, and vocals are much clearer on the former, but the latter is just more engaging.

     

    “Josie” exabits the overall pattern, but Takiguchi SACD’s disadvantage on bass, dynamics, and engagement is smaller. This allows its edge on resolution perhaps takes center stage, which helps to elevate it above the Hoffman CD on this track.

     

    Overall, it’s very difficult for me to declare a winner between the (likely) Hoffman-mastered CD and the Takiguchi SACD. So instead of declaring a winner, I’m simply going to add the Brown mastering to the mix. Given that, let’s take a look at how the Brown mastering’s EQ compares to the Hoffman’s and the Takiguchi’s.

     

    Here’s the Hoffman CD (purple) versus the Brown disc (pink) in Har-Bal:

     

    Aja - Hoffman vs Brown GIF.gif

     

    The clear pattern is that the Hoffman-mastered CD has more energy below 200 Hz. For the first three tracks of the album, it has whole lot more bass. For the rest of the album, it has a moderate amount more. Throughout the midrange and lower treble, the two masterings track each other closely. Then between approximately 7 and 15 kHz, the Brown mastering has a smidge more energy, while the Hoffman usually has a bit more above 15 kHz.

     

    Now let’s take a look at the Brown mastering (pink) compared to the Takiguchi (red):

     

    Aja - Brown vs Takaguchi GIF.gif

     

    Despite these both ostensibly being flat transfers, we can see some significant differences. First, the Takiguchi mastering consistently has much more subbass than the Brown mastering. It also tends to have a smidge more energy between approximately 1 and 3 kHz. Meanwhile, the Brown mastering consistently has more upper treble energy, beginning somewhere around 9 or 10 kHz, depending on the track.

     

    On “Black Cow,” the Brown disc has the Hoffman CD’s dynamics and the Takiguchi SACD’s resolution. Actually, the Brown CD’s resolution is even better. Its soundstage is also much more like Hoffman’s immersive presentation than the Takiguchi’s flat rendering. More importantly, the Brown CD does this without the muddying effect of Hoffman CD’s boosted low bass. Switching between these three masterings, one can’t help but be dazzled by the Brown CD’s presentation of subtle details. On the “down to Green Street, there you go” line, the reverb on Fagen’s voice is hardly audible on Hoffman CD but crystal clear on the Brown mastering. On the latter, I could even discern individual voices on “I’m the one” and “I don’t care anymore” backing vocals. Finally, cymbals and other elements have a three-dimensionality on the Brown CD that’s lacking on the other two masterings.

     

    Putting on “Aja,” I was struck by how the Brown CD seems to take the best parts of the other two masterings, combines them, then elevates them. Rainey’s bass has beautiful string articulation and round realism. In contrast, the Hoffman mastering renders his bass powerfully, but leaves it relatively flat and blunt. Similarly, the far left and right panned shakers are more realistic than on the Hoffman CD and better balanced than on the Takiguchi SACD.

     

    By “Deacon Blues,” my listening notes are getting repetitive. But the Brown mastering is, at a minimum, the best of both world. It fixes the Hoffman mastering’s soundstage issues but retains its dynamics and pop. It matches or exceeds the Takiguchi’s resolution and depth but is more immersive. Plus, both the backing vocals and horns are clear and separable on the Brown CD in a way they’re not on either competing version.

     

    Putting on “Peg,” I noted that Marotta’s cymbals and kick are much, much more realistic and nuanced on the Brown mastering than on Hoffman’s. The former presents microdetails, whereas the latter doesn’t go beyond blunt detail. As on the title track, the shaker during the chorus is much more audible and realistic on the Brown CD than on either other version. Likewise, Michael McDonald’s tightly layered backing vocals are more nuanced on Brown’s mastering.

     

    Turning to “Home at Last,” Brown’s mastering retains its Goldilocks edge, even if it’s smaller on this track. That’s because this is one of the Hoffman’s strongest tracks. Additionally, while it’s not a major issue, I noted the Brown CD’s somewhat higher level of tape hiss during the intro, at least compared to the Hoffman CD’s presentation. It’s hard to say whether this is due differences in EQ or a extra few decades of deterioration. But it doesn’t seem to impact the Brown mastering’s resolution.

     

    “I Got the News” showcases the Brown mastering’s enormous advantages. Ed Green’s drums are three-dimensional and nuanced, which is key to this track. Plus, the Brown mastering’s reduced subbass eliminates the Hoffman CD’s slight bloat, which distracts from dynamic swings at times. Supporting details like McDonald’s vocals or the synth strings mixed deep in the background are significantly clearer on the Brown disc than on either the Takiguchi SACD or the Hoffman CD. Indeed, the synth is both difficult to hear and amorphously placed on the latter.

     

    “Josie” seals the deal for the Brown mastering. From the first chimes, it’s clear that Brown’s mastering is so much more realistic than the Hoffman CD and so much more immersive and dynamic than the Takiguchi SACD.

     

    It’s no surprise that Brown’s mastering is the best of this trio. But since it’s hard to come by, I’m going to move both it and the Hoffman into the final-round matchup with the new Grundman mastering.

     

    Here’s how the Brown mastering (pink) compares to the new Analogue Production Grundman mastering (light blue):

     

    Aja - Brown vs Grundman GIF.gif

     

    Again, the scale on these graphs is large due to the big difference in the subbass. Compared to the Brown, however, we can see that the Grundman mastering has more energy below 50 Hz. That difference begins relatively modest, then becomes increasingly large the lower we go. Above that range, the Brown mastering tends to have a little more energy between 50 Hz and 2 kHz and above approximately 11 kHz. Meanwhile the Grundman sometimes has as a bit more energy between about 3 kHz and 10 kHz.

     

    Now here’s the Hoffman (purple) versus the Grundman (light blue):

     

    Aja - Hoffman vs Grundman GIF.gif

     

    The Hoffman mastering consistently has more energy in the bass, with a boost usually centered between 50 Hz and 250 Hz. Sometimes, its excess bass energy compared to the Grundman mastering’s extends all the way down to 20 Hz. But the Grundman mastering consistently has much more subbass. The Hoffman mastering also tends to have a smidge more energy throughout the midrange, then again above 15 kHz. The Grundman for its part has a little more energy between 5 kHz and 15 kHz, but the amount and the size of the range varies from track to track.

     

    So does Grundman’s much-anticipated mastering of Aja top Hoffman’s, Brown’s, or both?

     

    Rather than try to take them in pairs, I decided to line up the level-matched files from all three in Har-Bal and compare them simultaneously.

     

    Starting with “Black Cow,” I could tell this was going to be a tough matchup, at least when it comes to the Brown and the Grundman masterings.

     

    Why not the Hoffman? Well, when comparing the three masterings back-to-back-to-back with instant switching and applying the most critical ear possible,  it was apparent that the Hoffman CD just doesn’t have the same resolution as the other two. In overall tonality, the Hoffman comes closer to the Grundman, since both are bass-heavy presentations. But to me, it’s clear that Grundman’s mastering executes this perspective on Aja more deftly than the Hoffman CD does. Indeed, after the first few tracks, I became less and less focused on including what’s assumed to be Hoffman’s mastering in this analysis. It just can’t compete with the microdetails captured by the other two contenders.

     

    Between the Brown and the Grundman, the former took the early lead with “Black Cow.” That’s because the Grundman mastering has a little too much sibilance on lines like “they saw your face” line. This somewhat over-energetic presence region extends to Paul Humphrey’s hi-hat and cymbals, which seem too tizzy on the Grundman mastering, whether listening on the Utopia or the S8. Both the Hoffman and Grundman also impart a somewhat fuzzy, distorted quality to the “I can’t cry anymore” line. Finally, Victor Feldman’s Rhodes solo is pushed a too far into the background on the Grundman mastering, while sounding comparatively phony on the Hoffman CD. The Brown mastering, in contrast, nails all of these elements. Its main advantage is its overall greater transient crispness and sense of “air” in the recording. The Brown CD’s presentation just has a certain lifelike “rightness,” at least to my ear.

     

    On the other side of the ledger, though, Grundman’s mastering may do the best job of foregrounding Fagen’s vocals, a pattern that will continue throughout most tracks. Moreover, while I wasn’t crazy about its cymbal sound, I appreciated the overall tonality of Humphrey’s kit on Grundman’s mastering, particularly the extra thump of the kick and toms.

     

    Zooming out a bit, the Brown and Grundman masterings are both superb transfers of the tapes. They capture a lot of nuances that just aren’t apparent on other masterings, including Hoffman’s. Where they differ — besides their large differences in subbass and smaller differences elsewhere across the spectrum — is in their overall presentation. The Grundman mastering tends to smooth over transient attacks a bit, creating a cohesive, but less separable, whole. The Brown mastering, in contrast, makes it easier for the listener to turn their attention to individual elements in the mix. Those elements tend to sound more individually tonally accurate on the Brown disc than they do on Grundman’s mastering, which sounds very focused on Fagen’s vocals above all else. (More on this later.)

     

    Moving on to the title track, I immediately felt that both Michael Omartian’s piano and Steve Gadd’s drum kit sound too dark during the song’s intro on the Grundman download. They’re much better balanced on the Brown CD. The above-noted dissectability issue also was apparent. The electric guitar panned far right is much easier to isolate on the Brown mastering than on either the Grundman or the Hoffman. That said, I had no doubt that Grundman’s version of a bass-heavy take on “Aja” was better than Hoffman’s. For example, Gadd’s descending drum hits at the beginning of the second verse simply start too low on the Hoffman CD, leaving too little tonal space for their descent. In contrast, both the Grundman and Brown masterings make the downward steps clear.

     

    I anxiously awaited the famous solo section of “Aja,” which gives Gadd, Omartian, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter room to shine. I again felt that the Brown and Grundman masterings were head-and-shoulders better than the Hoffman CD. That said, there are clear tonal differences between the Brown and Grundman presentations. Shorter’s sax, for example, seems much drier on Grundman’s mastering than Brown’s. I tended to prefer the latter. But other elements, like Omartian’s piano, were a tougher call. Is the Brown mastering’s tonality more accurate or the Grundman’s? I honestly don’t know. We don’t know what it sounded like in the studio. Plus, it piano will sound slightly different depending on the transducer used by the listener.

     

    As “Aja” drew to a close, though, I did note that Victor Feldman’s auxiliary percussion sounded much clearer on the Brown mastering. His shaker, for example, had more body and detail, whereas it was primarily a “shhh” sound in both the Grundman and Brown’s rendering. Feldman’s triangle, panned far left, also is more discernable on the Brown CD.

     

    Next up is “Deacon Blues,” one of my favorite songs of all time. This is where I really became exacting. The first thing that jumped out at me is that Bernard Purdie’s snare sounds too boxy on Grundman’s mastering. This imparts a somewhat off-putting shadow beat, which throws off the track’s groove, at least to my ear. These same EQ tweaks also affect the entire mix. While the differences are subtle on the Har-Bal graph, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Grundman’s mastering is lacking a bit of needed midrange. The Brown CD, in contrast, sounds pretty much right-on to my ears.

     

    I also noted the separability issue again. The acoustic guitars panned far left and right, for example, are harder to heard on the Grundman download, an absence that tends to make it seem as though the soundstage is narrower than it is. Likewise, I could discern the separate voices on the “just what I feel” backing vocals more easily on Brown’s mastering. I also again preferred how the Brown mastering handles cymbals relative to the Grudman mastering’s presentation. On the latter, they simply sound to tizzy, no matter which headphones, IEMs, or speakers I used.

     

    On the other hand, while Fagen’s lead vocal sounds drier on Grundman’s mastering, it also sounds more intimate and lifelike. At least on “Deacon Blues,” I came to the conclusion that Brown’s mastering tends to keep almost all elements in the mix in the 95% accuracy range. In contrast, Grundman’s mastering gets close to 100% on some elements, like Fagen’s lead vocals, but can fall as low as 80% on others. To me, it really sounds like Grundman wanted to nail Fagen’s vocal sound and make sure that kick drums had enough thump, even if it threw off the sound of some other elements.

     

    Ultimately, that’s a difference in philosophy that’s defensible from both perspectives. My simultaneous love of how the Grundman mastering presented some elements, but clear preference for the Brown mastering on others, led me to try a variety of transducers on this track. For those keeping score, I preferred Brown’s mastering on the Utopia and Atrium Closed and the Grundman on the S8. Meanwhile, both on my speaker setup and through the DTE500 EST, it seemed like a tie. At a certain point, as I was replaying the same short sections over and over through each transducer, I felt like the famously obsessive Fagen and Becker scrutinizing small details.

     

    On “Peg,” I had an easier time declaring Brown’s mastering the winner. As I’ve noted at other points in this TBVO update, transients seem just a bit smoothed over on the Grundman mastering. Chuck Rainey’s bass, for example, doesn’t have as much snap and string articulation on the Grundman download as it does on the Brown CD. I also again felt that Rick Marotta’s snare sounded a bit too boxy, which tended to give it a somewhat amorphous placement in the soundstage. In other consistency between tracks, I thought that Marotta’s splash cymbal after the “I like your pin shot” line sounds more realistic on the Brown mastering and tizzier on Grundman. Similarly, the shaker again sounds clear on the Brown and like a generic “shhh” on the Grundman. On the other hand, both the Brown and Grundman masterings do a great job of presenting Michael McDonald’s tightly layered background vocals. Finally, I was curious to hear which mastering presented the right-mixed “Ooh ooh, yeah yeah” vamping background most clearly, and it was the Brown mastering without question.

     

    Turning to “Home at Last,” I happened to notice in Audacity that the Hoffman and Brown masterings share the same polarity, while the Grundman’s is flipped. I tend not to think this matters much for listeners, but it felt worth sharing. Beyond that, I think that the Brown and Grundman masterings are basically tied on this track. As has become a pattern, I slightly preferred how Grundman presents Fagen’s lead vocal, but I felt that most instruments sound better on Brown’s mastering.

     

    “I Got the News” presented clearer contrasts. The Grundman mastering’s presentation seems slightly too boomy. Most instruments — including piano, bass, and drums — sounded tighter and cleaner on the Brown CD. Again, the Grundman mastering tends to lean towards the low end thump, rather than string detail, on Rainey’s bass. Both the palm-muted electric guitar in the right channel and the synth strings on the bridge are clearer on Brown’s mastering, too. Indeed, this was the only track on which I also felt that Fagen’s lead vocal was clearly better on the Brown CD. To my ears, it’s slightly chesty on the Grundman download.

     

    Finishing with “Josie,” I simply marveled at how superb both masterings are. But mainly due to the snare sound and overall resolution, I still slightly preferred Brown’s take on “Josie.”

     

    Where does that leave us? I feel confident that the two best digital versions of Aja are Brown’s and Grundman’s. While this is an incredibly close call, I think Brown’s mastering is the best overall. However, discerning Dan audiophiles should be thrilled with the addition of Grudnman’s mastering, which easily trumps every other version besides Brown’s and (unlike the Brown disc) is readily available.

     

     

     

     

     

    1. There are dozens of CD releases of Aja, including some very obscure Japanese and Russian pressings. To my knowledge, all of the existing releases as of this writing feature one of the seven masterings mentioned above. The only mastering excluded from this list is a new MQA CD release. It’s excluded not only because of questions about the fidelity of the MQA format, but also because it’s exceedingly rare. Despite my skepticism about MQA, if I manage to get my hands on a copy of the MQA CD, I’ll update this piece. 

    2. Audacity was used for waveforms.

    3.  For the subjective analyses, all editions were ripped with XLD and played Audirvana Plus. The DAC/Amp combo was a Schiit Yggdrasil/Ragnarok stack. Most critical listening was done on a diverse set of headphones: NAD HP50, Sennheiser/Massdrop HD6XX, and Focal Clear.

    4.  I wondered if the Hoffman’s seeming edge in fidelity had to do with differences in EQ. To test this, I used Har-Bal’s mastering-cloning feature to apply the Hoffman mastering’s EQ to the Takiguchi file. While there are limits to what Har-Bal’s filters can do (the Hoffman master still had more low bass), it was relatively difficult to tell the resulting files apart when comparing them side-by-side in Audacity, and I doubt anyone could detect differences in clarity between the two a blind test.

    5.  There’s been great debate as to whether “Mastering 3” and “Mastering 6” as defined in these posts is the same as the confirmed Hoffman mastering (“Mastering 7” in the posts). Some of the CDs listed have slightly different peak levels, and the track times on many differ slightly. (On some versions, the end of one track even contains the first moments of the next track.) However, if the audio files are trimmed to contain the exact same parts of the songs, the three different graphs available in Har-Bal all show that masterings three, six, and seven are all Hoffman’s mastering, at least according to the copies of each that I have. 


     

     

     

     

    About the Author

    Josh Mound has been an audiophile since age 14, when his father played Spirit's "Nature’s Way" through his Boston Acoustics floorstanders and told Josh to listen closely. Since then, Josh has listened to lots of music, owned lots of gear, and done lots of book learnin'. He's written about music for publications like Filter and Under the Radar and about politics for publications like New Republic, Jacobin, and Dissent. Josh is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on modern U.S. politics and the history of popular music. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two cats.




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    I have the MFSL and the SACD. Can never decide which one I like best - and this article explains why. Thanks, Josh.

    Question: is the ‘84 version at Tidal the Nichols remaster?

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    fascinating insights as always... only thing I'd add is that including analog / record versions of these trials would possibly tilt outcomes somehow... for example, I have the original ABC Aja, the MoFi (which was highly regarded), the Robert Pincus consulted and mastered (ex-Cisco, pre-IMPEX) reissue from mid 2000s. Of these, the Pincus mastered is the best followed by the MoFi, which sometimes splits the original pressing. The issue with Steely Dan titles is that the original tapes are mostly missing and there have been many errors made decoding the existing tapes with the proper Dolby decoders, some of which have been mislabeled, lost, etc. 

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    Great writeup. Why didn't you consider the Cisco pressing? My understanding is that it's the definitive vinyl version. 

     

    Aja ‎(LP, Album, Ltd, Num, RE, RM, 30t) Cisco Music CLP-1006 US 2007

     

    Would be interested in hearing your opinion on Nightfly. Another highly respected production that Mofi gave a special treatment for the second time. 

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    Fun to read about (and to poke around in eBay seeing who wants a lot of money and who may have undiscovered treasures), but since I picked up the entire "Citizen" set for $3 in a used CD/record store, I guess I'm sticking with that.  :) 

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    This is a quite useful post over on the Hoffman forums:

     

    https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/steely-dan-cds-different-masterings-the-summary-thread.561226/#post-14611213

     

    I have mastering #3 which is the same as mastering #7 when comparing waveforms. See this thread:

     

    https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/steely-dan-cds-different-masterings-aja.158372/

     

    I like my CD better than any other I have heard, including the MFSL.

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    The Cisco is overhyped, the Santa Maria pressing the "One". Curious what was the lineage of the CSM and Japanese VIM? Pretty sure there is an updated CSM "out there"

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    3 hours ago, firedog said:

    I have the MFSL and the SACD. Can never decide which one I like best - and this article explains why. Thanks, Josh.

    Question: is the ‘84 version at Tidal the Nichols remaster?

     

    Let me take a look at what’s on streaming and add a comment here about it. I believe one of them is the ‘99 Nichols, but I don’t know about any others. From now on, I’ll try to add info about streaming in the articles or as a footnote when possible. 

     

    1 hour ago, diecaster said:

    This is a quite useful post over on the Hoffman forums:

     

    https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/steely-dan-cds-different-masterings-the-summary-thread.561226/#post-14611213

     

    I have mastering #3 which is the same as mastering #7 when comparing waveforms. See this thread:

     

    https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/steely-dan-cds-different-masterings-aja.158372/

     

    I like my CD better than any other I have heard, including the MFSL.

     

    You have one of the Hoffman “clones.” Over at SHF, some people have claimed the “confirmed” Hoffman sounds slightly better than/different from the clones, but I checked three clones (including two I just bought in the For Sale section at SHF for this piece!) against a confirmed Hoffman and the EQ is identical. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that some of the clones fix a track mark issue, where the first second of the next track is actually at the end of the previous track if you rip the CD. Some of the clones also might have silenced the gaps between songs more than others. But the actual musical content, as far as I can tell, is identical. 

     

    2 hours ago, Johnseye said:

    Great writeup. Why didn't you consider the Cisco pressing? My understanding is that it's the definitive vinyl version. 

     

    Aja ‎(LP, Album, Ltd, Num, RE, RM, 30t) Cisco Music CLP-1006 US 2007

     

    Would be interested in hearing your opinion on Nightfly. Another highly respected production that Mofi gave a special treatment for the second time. 

     

    I didn’t consider the Cisco only becuse I was just using the vinyl rips as a baseline of artist intent to compare the digital editions against. So I only wanted original Grundman masterings. Also, while I understand some people might like vinyl rips as their digital version of an album, I’m with Nichols: I prefer digital to vinyl. Plus, the vinyl rips are all unofficial releases, which isn’t something I want to get into (beyond the odd need for a vinyl comparison, like this case), for ethical and practical reasons. 

     

    1 hour ago, thedregs said:

    The Cisco is overhyped, the Santa Maria pressing the "One". Curious what was the lineage of the CSM and Japanese VIM? Pretty sure there is an updated CSM "out there"

     

    The lineage info for the CSM rip says it’s the 1977 AB-1006 pressing. I believe there’s an AA-1006 pressing. The people over in that SHF thread uniformly laud the AB-1006, though. As far as I know, Grundman was the only mastering engineer for the original vinyl, so I’m not sure what would account for any sonic differences in the pressings (beyond the inherent variation in the pressing of vinyl, “hot stampers,” etc.). I just tried to compare all the original vinyl rips that claim to have the Grundman mastering that I could find to figure out what was the normal representation of the Grudman vinyl mastering. The fact that both the CSM and Japanese pressings (both of which are praised by audiophiles) were high-quality rips with nearly-identical graphs in Har-Bal song-for-song made me feel confident that I knew what the Grundman mastering looked like.  

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    Yeah, this is one of the most interesting pieces I've read on CA/AS and I'm not a Steely Dan fan.

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    Great article and great fun to read.  

     

    I have the 1999 Nichols CD mastering and what I believe may be the same 1984 CD mastering as diecaster's (the matrix info on mine reads MCAD 37214 DIDY 000055, which puts it in "mastering #3" on the Hoffman forum thread).  Whether or not that's a "Hoffman clone", it is a pleasure to listen to.  As is the 1999 remaster.

     

    https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/steely-dan-cds-different-masterings-the-summary-thread.561226/#post-14611213

     

    I prefer the 1984 CD mastering, but probably because I know it's the 1984 mastering when I put it on.  

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    I have a 1984 release marked 37214 also, but dunno if it is Mastering #3 or #4.

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    29 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

    I have a 1984 release marked 37214 also, but dunno if it is Mastering #3 or #4.

     

    It should be shown in the matrix next to where it says 000000055.  I have a #3.  I also have the MFSL and the recent Japanese flat transfer Platinum CD.   I think it’s a toss up, and probably system dependent, whether the “SH master” or the Japanese CD is better, but both beat the MFSL.

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    Interesting about the MFSL (!)

     

     

    I'm not sure what you mean by matrix.  There is a faint code - only readable from the back side - stamped into the CD just inside the silver data annulus - it starts out with 1AMCAD..."

     

    Then there is a stamp inside of that on the clear part which reads CMU P 51.

     

    Neither has the zeros or the 55.

     

    The case the CD is in (and which hopefully matches the CD) does say DIDY 55 on the back and on the 'spine' so maybe I have Mastering #3 (or a case for Mastering #3)...

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    You guys can run your CDs through EAC or XLD to see what the track levels are and match from there. 

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    Thanks for a great article. I really enjoyed it. I bought it as a download from 7digital - no idea what version they sold me, but it's a bit bright and sounds very much "early digital".

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    1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

    Interesting about the MFSL (!)

     

     

    I'm not sure what you mean by matrix.  There is a faint code - only readable from the back side - stamped into the CD just inside the silver data annulus - it starts out with 1AMCAD..."

     

    Then there is a stamp inside of that on the clear part which reads CMU P 51.

     

    Neither has the zeros or the 55.

     

    The case the CD is in (and which hopefully matches the CD) does say DIDY 55 on the back and on the 'spine' so maybe I have Mastering #3 (or a case for Mastering #3)...

     

    1 hour ago, diecaster said:

    You guys can run your CDs through EAC or XLD to see what the track levels are and match from there. 

     

    Yes, using EAC or XLD (or the Computer ReplayGain feature in Audirvana) to get the peak levels is the easiest way to tell. The big debate was whether the “clones” of the Hoffman were actually any different from the Hoffman. As I noted in a footnote, they don’t look any different in Har-Bal. I think the only difference is different track markers and the silence between songs. 

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    Finding it hard to identify the different versions on Amazon. What do people recommend?

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    If I can't find the release through a search on Amazon, I check eBay, where I've had more success finding specific releases that are hard to find on Amazon (e.g. the 1988 original CD version of Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece).   I find Amazon seems to favor the most recent mastering in the search results; I've had to stick in specific years with the album name to find older masterings, if available.  I haven't tried discogs.

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    1 hour ago, Mayfair said:

    If I can't find the release through a search on Amazon, I check eBay, where I've had more success finding specific releases that are hard to find on Amazon (e.g. the 1988 original CD version of Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece).   I find Amazon seems to favor the most recent mastering in the search results; I've had to stick in specific years with the album name to find older masterings, if available.  I haven't tried discogs.

    Right. More often than not, I can't actually tell what the release is on Amazon. And the customer comments below often apply to any one of the versions (vinyl/cd/import cd/etc) so it is even more cryptic. If only they quoted the item's manufacturer version it would make it easier to tell. Additionally you sometimes don't get the exact release you purchased.

     

    BTW... Looked into the SMH-SACD... Bought from AcousticSounds it is $60, from CDJapan it's $34 + about the same amount in shipping... :(

     

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    It was fun to listen to each track after it was dissected in the article. I have owned a red vinyl version of Aja since it was a hot new release. Despite my concern that coloured vinyl may turn out to be inferior, it's still in great shape after more than a thousand plays. It is now ripped at 24/88. I rarely make a change in my system without playing Crime of the Century, followed by Aja. 

     

    I'm surprised there was no mention about sexual references in Dan lyrics. Maybe the band's name takes my mind there, but some lines seem pretty blatantly sexy. I Got The News and Josie are prime examples.

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