Encouraging to hear from Kassem and Fagen the presumed lost original master tapes were located and used for this project.
IDK: were the stereo masters ever presumed lost? The original NYT reporting about the Universal fire included an anecdote about Irv Azoff & Elliott Scheiner going to the Iron Mountain facility outside Pittsburgh and verifying that the
multi-track masters for the first seven albums (minus "Black Cow" and "Aja" from
Aja) were safe and sound. Less clear what-all of SD's might still have been in the Universal vaults. I had it in my head that it was basically whatever stray outtakes & working tapes had managed to escape Becker & Fagen's own ruthless purges. And I seem to remember
@steelydave plausibly theorizing that ABC's
quad masters were already long gone. But maybe there'd also been an assumption (fear?) that some of the stereo masters were there?
At any rate, I'd be curious to know what sort of shape they were in; what sort of "treatment" (including EQ and NR) was done to them for the new mastering, including the transfer to DSD; and why exactly the original stereo masters for
Aja and
Gaucho weren't usable or available. (Although in the
impossibly tangled history of these albums' "path to digital," it seems that as early as 1981 and 1982, Roger Nichols found that the analog masters "were in terrible shape, due to improper storage, and had poor fidelity"--and that the stereo master for the B-side of
Aja was
already missing! In his reply to one of the commenters on the YouTube announcement video, Kassem says that "There’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.") And those "first-generation" copies: Japanese masters?
Cutting masters? (Kassem believes that "[c]hances are the Cisco tape copy [was] made from the tape we're using.") Inquiring minds. . . .
Credit Kassem, vinyl geek that he is, for pressing 14 audiophile MC SACDs of the creme de la creme along with 100-odd desirable stereo rock, pop, jazz & blues titles.
His catalog is a contrast & complement to the easy listening & classical genres D-V offers.
The Wizard of Sa-l(eye)-na (like Carolina) Kansas.
He's a genuine fanboy, and you gotta love that back-bay bayou accent. I'm just concerned that after all the hoopla, and all the wrangling that seems to have been involved to get both Fagen and Universal on board with this project, this series of releases will now be regarded as the Final Word on those albums, and it'll remove the incentive, and maybe even the possibility, of doing anything else with them in the future.
