Cimcie, THANK YOU for all you (and of course, your dad) have done for us lifelong SD fans. We’re STILL losing our collective minds over The Second Arrangement! Just incredible stuff…
Yay!! I love that! Sorry to bombard you with all this stuff, I don't want to overwhelm your minds... maybe i should take a breather but the flood gates have opened hahahahhaha
@@iamcimcie Bless you for realizing that your dad was the chief engineer for a band who's fans are really fanatical. We indeed want all this stuff you are un-earth-ing. A million thanks.
What I'm getting is the changes in environment changed the DBX decoding curve such that it no longer matched the encoding curve and the DBX techs were never able to replicate the correct decoding curve. If I'm characterizing it accurately, there may be a technological solution to this problem. Since you still have the tapes, perhaps this is a good opportunity to try and have AI reconstruct or figure out the right decoding curve. If there's a baseline you cat start with and then train the model with various changes so that the engine recognizes what constitutes improvement and what constitutes degradation. We may now have the computing technology to crack the code, so to speak.
Wow, that was a quick response! The Katy Lied DBX problem is well known among the SD fan base, but I've never heard an explanation at this level of detail before. A local AM radio station and a grounding problem. Mmmm. These little nuggets you continue to upload are priceless. Thank you!
Even with the somewhat inferior audio quality compared their other records, Katy Lied is still, by quite a wide margin, my favorite Steely Dan album. It, IMO, contains the largest number of truly great Dan songs.
Yes, I had a DBX II model 128 and a REVOX A77 - what a disaster !! any dropout due to tape imperfection was exaggerated exponentially - perfect plyback was an absolute requirement for proper decoding - never worked.
This is interesting i have always thought this album had a strange sound, like Jeffs ride cymbal and crashes and some of the piano sits weird in tne mix always loved the songs on it despite the weird production
Yes, it's the cymbals that really give away the problem with the DBX encoding/decoding problem. The crash particularly sounds very odd. It sounds like Jeff used a very minimal cymbal set up on the Katy Lied sessions - hats, a ride and one crash. The crash sounds high passed, which makes it sound small and very thin - almost toy-like. Also, there's a subtle phasing which doesn't help. If you listen to other sessions Jeff played on during this period, you can hear what the cymbals should've sounded like. I remember hearing this album shortly after it was released and remarked that the crash sounded odd.
Astounding! Katy is probably my fav Dan record and this is another gold nugget hearing your father explain in detail the problems with these confounded DBX machines. Truly Herculean efforts of your father to engineer these recordings in the time of analog. Thank you again, Cimcie!
Thank you so much Cimcie!! Your dad played an essential role in the most fundamental soundtrack of my life, and these golden nuggets you are revealing are SO much fun!
Katy Lied is my favorite SD album. Maybe buying it in the cassette format back in 1975 helped me to appreciate it all the more once I had the LP and eventual CD releases. I think it is a gorgeous album.
So glad to hear someone else say it's their favorite, absolutely gorgeous...I bought the LPs back in the day, still have them all.......listened to Katy Lied over and over again when in college in the late 70's...something about that particular record connected with me.....especially Doctor Wu....Don't seem right, I've been strung out here all night, I've been waiting for that taste you said you would bring to me.....Biscayne Bay, where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day, I was searching for the song you used to sing to me.........Katy lies, you can see it in her eyes, but imagine my surprise when I saw you.....
Katy Lied was an album I dubbed to cassette with Dolby B NR turned on but then played with the Dolby off. A bit more noise but also more clarity. Didn’t *fix* the sound but did help.
I have always loved the Katy Lied album that was recorded using helium cooled heads. I am here to tell you though that The Royal Scam album is the best overall sound quality of any SD album. Just a rich, full sound and the bass and percussion is very prominent in the mix like no other Dan album. Anyone agree? Maybe they learned their lesson from the Katy Lied issues.
Honestly, with the original undecoded dbx audio and some crowd-based analysis of them to find the best-fit curves, I bet we could get the originals back in shape in a matter of weeks.
Thank you for this and the SA upload!!! After hearing that and some of the other deleted songs, I have said over and over that Gaucho could have EASILY been a second masterpiece for SD. SMH.
That high end definitely got chopped. Some songs I think were less affected than others by the DBX debacle. Chain Lightning comes to mind. The Katy outtakes hint at what could have been.
Fantastic Cimcie. I always wanted to hear more about this...the album has always frustrated me with that poor sound. Who better than your DAD to explain the situation? Amazing information.
@@iamcimciemy dad passed at 97 and I still want to ask him about stuff. I dream about him all the time, but we're just hanging out, working in the yard, golfing, no secrets of the universe😊
Great interview! The audio needs a HPF probably around 80Hz - there is a low frequency rumble present on the recording, it is VERY prominent when listening in enclosed headphones. I suspect it would make a subwoofer go bananas too
I bought my first "Katy Lied" album in March of 1975, and immediately noticed the sibilance when Donald Fagen sang the words "Cuban gentlemen" in the song "Doctor Wu." Would that be related to these technical issues as well?
Always thought Katy Lied sounded very “flat”. Good reason. Been waiting almost a year for the new Katy Lied pressing from Acoustic Sounds. Hopefully it will will correct some of that. Thanks for sharing- again !
And of course they skipped it for aja and gaucho haha. While they're probably spacing out the releases for commercial reasons, I don't doubt fagen is taking a long time to get it perfect.
Why did your last two videos get removed for "violating RUclips's community guidelines"??? For uploading a video of a birthday party? The hell is RUclips doing now?
This is so good, I listened to it twice, I've heard Roger speak about this before, but never with this much detail! This might be controversial, and I don't think I was the first to posit this, but I have long suspected that the sound quality issues that we notice with Katy Lied have less to do with the DBX malfunction, and more to do with the choice of cymbal microphones. The only evidence I have to support this is that I've heard "outtakes" that are supposedly from before the DBX malfunction, and the cymbals still sound really weird. Other than The Second Arrangement, this is the one Steely Dan technical thing that bugs the hell out of me. I would love to hear this album someday without the cymbals sounding weird. I suppose AI will probably remedy that eventually. 🤷♀️
yeah! So grateful we got our hands on 1985 lectures, he still had those days fresh in his mind. And idk about the other stuff, AI elves are hard at work i am sure, dad would have loved AI ha
@@iamcimcie Jeez, that was the year I was born. I saw a video somewhere with your dad where he was talking about a new dynamics processing technology that he was working on at the time. I think the video was from the early 2000's, and he was talking about this new technology he had created where you can pick out a specific frequency spectrum with an equalizer and only compress those frequencies. As I was watching the video, it occurred to me that he was probably motivated to create that technology because he was still trying to invent ways to fix the Katy Lied tapes, it really hit me in the feels.
Yeah, I know. He did indicate that the AM radio station was no longer operating. So why would there still be a signal emanating from a non-existent source? On top of that, I've read other accounts which blame the disaster on a malfunctioning humidifier system which over-humidified the ABC studio one day during the recording process and moisturized much of the equipment. Go figure.
@@nickgodalin6487 I think, the problem was this: when the AM station was transmitting when they were doing both recording and playback the companding errors were, say, compensated - what was wrong in recording curves was mirrored back to normal (more or less) playback with opposite-wrong decoding curves. When the AM station went off the mirror condition was gone ("curves gone to normal") so no more compensation for disturbed recording curves.
what was the issue on Black Cow? I see a Y2K Forum post, he said "No compression on the Black Cow drums. Maybe some tape compression, but no on purpose. Black Cow was before digital (do I have to say analog in front of all these people?) If I remember correctly, 421s on the toms. We would switch between 421 and SM56 on snare depending on which snare was being used. I don't remember which one on the actual take we used. 414 on overheads and some Sony Electret condenser on the hat. Oh yeah, and an EV 666 on the kick drum. If you get the drums sounding good, (full bodied yet crispy & just the right amount of ring) you don't need to compress them."
@@iamcimcie I misspoke. Not tracks, I was referring to CHANNELS, analog multi-CHANNELS are supposedly missing on Black Cow original recording. There are a few articles out there about it when you google it. I don't know what happened, but f you compare Black Cow to the other tracks, you will clearly notice its lack of spacial color and multi channel sound. Muddy and muted. Basically the track sounds like a demo in comparison the rest of the album. That being said, I LOVE Black Cow. I am a sucker for the Steely Dan backbeat, bluesy funk.
![Stromae, Pomme - “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1F3OGIFnW1k/mqdefault.jpg)
Cimcie, THANK YOU for all you (and of course, your dad) have done for us lifelong SD fans. We’re STILL losing our collective minds over The Second Arrangement! Just incredible stuff…
Yay!! I love that! Sorry to bombard you with all this stuff, I don't want to overwhelm your minds... maybe i should take a breather but the flood gates have opened hahahahhaha
@@iamcimciekeep the flood gates open, please.
@@iamcimcie Keep it coming!!!
@@iamcimcie Bless you for realizing that your dad was the chief engineer for a band who's fans are really fanatical. We indeed want all this stuff you are un-earth-ing. A million thanks.
What I'm getting is the changes in environment changed the DBX decoding curve such that it no longer matched the encoding curve and the DBX techs were never able to replicate the correct decoding curve. If I'm characterizing it accurately, there may be a technological solution to this problem.
Since you still have the tapes, perhaps this is a good opportunity to try and have AI reconstruct or figure out the right decoding curve. If there's a baseline you cat start with and then train the model with various changes so that the engine recognizes what constitutes improvement and what constitutes degradation. We may now have the computing technology to crack the code, so to speak.
Wow, that was a quick response! The Katy Lied DBX problem is well known among the SD fan base, but I've never heard an explanation at this level of detail before. A local AM radio station and a grounding problem. Mmmm. These little nuggets you continue to upload are priceless. Thank you!
yeah!! So grateful for Berklee School of Music for having this lecture to send us - 1985 this stuff was still pretty fresh in his mind.
WKRP in Cincinnati destroyed Katy Lied ;)
@@jml-rj5re At least it wasn't WJAZ. These AM stations should change to FM. No static at all.
@@PhilUKNet well played my friend.
Even with the somewhat inferior audio quality compared their other records, Katy Lied is still, by quite a wide margin, my favorite Steely Dan album. It, IMO, contains the largest number of truly great Dan songs.
Yes, I had a DBX II model 128 and a REVOX A77 - what a disaster !! any dropout due to tape imperfection was exaggerated exponentially - perfect plyback was an absolute requirement for proper decoding - never worked.
What history! Very generous of you to share, Cimcie. TNX
That's a great picture of Roger with that big smile next to his control board. You too have that infectious smile, Cimcie. 💖
This is interesting i have always thought this album had a strange sound, like Jeffs ride cymbal and crashes and some of the piano sits weird in tne mix always loved the songs on it despite the weird production
Yes, it's the cymbals that really give away the problem with the DBX encoding/decoding problem. The crash particularly sounds very odd. It sounds like Jeff used a very minimal cymbal set up on the Katy Lied sessions - hats, a ride and one crash. The crash sounds high passed, which makes it sound small and very thin - almost toy-like. Also, there's a subtle phasing which doesn't help. If you listen to other sessions Jeff played on during this period, you can hear what the cymbals should've sounded like. I remember hearing this album shortly after it was released and remarked that the crash sounded odd.
I could listen to your dad all day long - thanks for these posts!
yay same here. he was always really good at explaining things
This is a hell of a story!
yeah!! when i get some more down time i will dig around and post more stories.
Astounding! Katy is probably my fav Dan record and this is another gold nugget hearing your father explain in detail the problems with these confounded DBX machines. Truly Herculean efforts of your father to engineer these recordings in the time of analog. Thank you again, Cimcie!
So great to hear it explained in detail. Thanks!
i knew i heard it from him somewhere in my archive travels!
Thank you so much Cimcie!! Your dad played an essential role in the most fundamental soundtrack of my life, and these golden nuggets you are revealing are SO much fun!
Katy Lied is my favorite SD album. Maybe buying it in the cassette format back in 1975 helped me to appreciate it all the more once I had the LP and eventual CD releases. I think it is a gorgeous album.
So glad to hear someone else say it's their favorite, absolutely gorgeous...I bought the LPs back in the day, still have them all.......listened to Katy Lied over and over again when in college in the late 70's...something about that particular record connected with me.....especially Doctor Wu....Don't seem right, I've been strung out here all night, I've been waiting for that taste you said you would bring to me.....Biscayne Bay, where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day, I was searching for the song you used to sing to me.........Katy lies, you can see it in her eyes, but imagine my surprise when I saw you.....
It's my favourite as well.
Thank you! I’ve always wondered about this
It is true that Kathy Lied sounds strange, interesting to know why.
Katy Lied was an album I dubbed to cassette with Dolby B NR turned on but then played with the Dolby off. A bit more noise but also more clarity. Didn’t *fix* the sound but did help.
I love all of these items you’re releasing.
I have always loved the Katy Lied album that was recorded using helium cooled heads. I am here to tell you though that The Royal Scam album is the best overall sound quality of any SD album. Just a rich, full sound and the bass and percussion is very prominent in the mix like no other Dan album.
Anyone agree?
Maybe they learned their lesson from the Katy Lied issues.
Cheers from Brazil!
I'm so amazed to watch all this memorabilia. Please, keep up!
Ok, i will!
Honestly, with the original undecoded dbx audio and some crowd-based analysis of them to find the best-fit curves, I bet we could get the originals back in shape in a matter of weeks.
Brilliant! Thank you.
Thank you for this and the SA upload!!! After hearing that and some of the other deleted songs, I have said over and over that Gaucho could have EASILY been a second masterpiece for SD. SMH.
That high end definitely got chopped. Some songs I think were less affected than others by the DBX debacle. Chain Lightning comes to mind. The Katy outtakes hint at what could have been.
Thank you a million times over for this.
You’re welcome! ❤️
Cimcie your karma account is very very rich thanks for all you do for us
Thank you for saying this. I’ve had a rough few years and am grateful for the reassurances ❤️
I always thought the piano sounded so great on your gold teeth II, that's why ahah
Fantastic Cimcie. I always wanted to hear more about this...the album has always frustrated me with that poor sound.
Who better than your DAD to explain the situation? Amazing information.
right!? I love when i can find him explaining stuff that we want to know. You never really know what you want to ask until their gone sometimes.
@@iamcimciemy dad passed at 97 and I still want to ask him about stuff. I dream about him all the time, but we're just hanging out, working in the yard, golfing, no secrets of the universe😊
@@dwillard670 Same with me. My dad's been gone 15 years now and I still have dreams with both of us in the old house. Which was torn down years ago..
Great story, thank you!
Tu Cimie for making this available
Great interview!
The audio needs a HPF probably around 80Hz - there is a low frequency rumble present on the recording, it is VERY prominent when listening in enclosed headphones.
I suspect it would make a subwoofer go bananas too
The original mixes for Katy Lied in Rogers archive?... Now That would be a treat if it's able to be fixed.
oof. i heard that too.
Cool story!👍
This too was covered by the lads in the Katy Lied reissue by MCA. Sonic cooties was the key word 😂
I bought my first "Katy Lied" album in March of 1975, and immediately noticed the sibilance when Donald Fagen sang the words "Cuban gentlemen" in the song "Doctor Wu." Would that be related to these technical issues as well?
I think that is just the style of Donald's vocals..
Always thought Katy Lied sounded very “flat”. Good reason. Been waiting almost a year for the new Katy Lied pressing from Acoustic Sounds. Hopefully it will will correct some of that.
Thanks for sharing- again !
And of course they skipped it for aja and gaucho haha. While they're probably spacing out the releases for commercial reasons, I don't doubt fagen is taking a long time to get it perfect.
Thank you so much!
Having a mustard stain on the tape (after you've sent it to a lab for analysis) doesn't help either.
"New and Improved" most of the time only means "New".
hahaha true
Why were the Walter Becker videos removed? Also, thank you for sharing all of this, especially the Second Arrangement tape!
RF interfering is real I can use a CB radio and blast my cassette 4 track, might even try it with effects one day
Cell towers killed my studio... so, yeah.
@@morbidmanmusic really? I have really dirty power in this house so u just go with it. its noise experiment at this point.
Cool, do it!
If this is true, a signal generator on the AM frequency could be injected into the system.
Can DBX be used to boost the volume level of a RUclips video?
Why did your last two videos get removed for "violating RUclips's community guidelines"??? For uploading a video of a birthday party? The hell is RUclips doing now?
I don’t know!! It was a child policy violation so something about kids being in it?! I don’t know what the trigger was exactly
between 2:23 and 2:24 I hear a woman breathing a sigh? confirm or deny?
oh yeah, weird! good catch. it was a class
This is so good, I listened to it twice, I've heard Roger speak about this before, but never with this much detail!
This might be controversial, and I don't think I was the first to posit this, but I have long suspected that the sound quality issues that we notice with Katy Lied have less to do with the DBX malfunction, and more to do with the choice of cymbal microphones. The only evidence I have to support this is that I've heard "outtakes" that are supposedly from before the DBX malfunction, and the cymbals still sound really weird.
Other than The Second Arrangement, this is the one Steely Dan technical thing that bugs the hell out of me. I would love to hear this album someday without the cymbals sounding weird. I suppose AI will probably remedy that eventually. 🤷♀️
yeah! So grateful we got our hands on 1985 lectures, he still had those days fresh in his mind. And idk about the other stuff, AI elves are hard at work i am sure, dad would have loved AI ha
@@iamcimcie Jeez, that was the year I was born. I saw a video somewhere with your dad where he was talking about a new dynamics processing technology that he was working on at the time. I think the video was from the early 2000's, and he was talking about this new technology he had created where you can pick out a specific frequency spectrum with an equalizer and only compress those frequencies. As I was watching the video, it occurred to me that he was probably motivated to create that technology because he was still trying to invent ways to fix the Katy Lied tapes, it really hit me in the feels.
@@Cedric_Harris Sounds like a multiband compressor.
The recording of the cymbals was another problem that may have contributed to the DBX failure..
Confusing testimony. Was the DBX broken or did the AM signal cause a companding issue?
Did not Roger put it clear? AM radio and grounding problems.
Yeah, I know. He did indicate that the AM radio station was no longer operating. So why would there still be a signal emanating from a non-existent source?
On top of that, I've read other accounts which blame the disaster on a malfunctioning humidifier system which over-humidified the ABC studio one day during the recording process and moisturized much of the equipment. Go figure.
@@nickgodalin6487 I think, the problem was this: when the AM station was transmitting when they were doing both recording and playback the companding errors were, say, compensated - what was wrong in recording curves was mirrored back to normal (more or less) playback with opposite-wrong decoding curves. When the AM station went off the mirror condition was gone ("curves gone to normal") so no more compensation for disturbed recording curves.
Cimcie, do you have any of your father's commentary on Black Cow track issue, off Aja?
I'm more interested in "I Got the News".
hmm, i will keep an ear out for it.
ok, mentally noted.
what was the issue on Black Cow? I see a Y2K Forum post, he said "No compression on the Black Cow drums. Maybe some tape compression, but no on purpose. Black Cow was before digital (do I have to say analog in front of all these people?)
If I remember correctly, 421s on the toms. We would switch between 421 and SM56 on snare depending on which snare was being used. I don't remember which one on the actual take we used. 414 on overheads and some Sony Electret condenser on the hat. Oh yeah, and an EV 666 on the kick drum.
If you get the drums sounding good, (full bodied yet crispy & just the right amount of ring) you don't need to compress them."
@@iamcimcie I misspoke. Not tracks, I was referring to CHANNELS, analog multi-CHANNELS are supposedly missing on Black Cow original recording. There are a few articles out there about it when you google it. I don't know what happened, but f you compare Black Cow to the other tracks, you will clearly notice its lack of spacial color and multi channel sound. Muddy and muted. Basically the track sounds like a demo in comparison the rest of the album. That being said, I LOVE Black Cow. I am a sucker for the Steely Dan backbeat, bluesy funk.