Steely Dan
Aja

The sixth studio album by the American jazz rock band Steely Dan, released on September 23, 1977. The album peaked at number three on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, and number five on the UK Albums Chart, ultimately becoming Steely Dan's most commercially successful release.

CD: Awesome sound quality As was apparently standard practice during the era of analog recording, two sets of original stereo analog masters were made in parallel during mixing for all of Steely Dan's studio albums up through Gaucho, and Roger Nichols (SD's main recording engineer) kept one set in his personal archive and maintained them with TLC. I've always suspected that Nichols had these original masters digitized as soon as a worthy digital process became available, and based on a little Googling, it appears that such a process became available in about 1997 when Nichols got his hands on an early Apogee AD-8000 24-bit, 48KHz (max), 8 channel ADC. According to a supposed Nichols quote, he considered the AD-8000 to be "essential," so it evidently met his high standards. So, it probably wasn't a coincidence that the remastered CD's became available soon after Nichols began using an AD-8000. The remastered Aja CD is bright, and I suspect that it was digitally EQ'd, but it's amazingly clean and it sounds very analog. In fact, it's the cleanest version I've ever heard, and I had the MoFi LP which I got as soon as it became available, which was shortly after the album was released in 1977. In case you think that you would need an expensive, high-end CD player to do justice to such a CD, you might be surprised to learn that my player is a $100 Nobsound Bluetooth 4.2 Lossless Player, which I gave five stars on Amazon. As far as I can tell, it has no sound of its own, and I don't need anything better. It's also important to play each CD with the right audio polarity, although some CD's aren't very sensitive to polarity. Most CD's, including the remastered Aja CD, have standard audio polarity and sound best on systems with standard polarity, but some have inverted polarity and sound best on systems with inverted polarity. Steely Dan's Alive in America CD and the Steven-Wilson-remixed Aqualung CD (the one mastered by Peter Mew, and sold by itself) have non-standard polarity, and you haven't heard these CD's until you've heard them with the right polarity. To invert the audio polarity of .wav's or FLAC's, you would invert them with an an audio-editing program. To invert audio polarity in general, you could use a polarity control on the digital player, preamp, or receiver. But polarity controls are essentially nonexistent on consumer audio gear (although I managed to find a couple of Audio Research preamps with polarity controls), and if you want to flip your system's polarity, the only options are to manually flip the polarity of each speaker connection, which can be a real chore, or to put a switch in-line with each speaker cable, as described below. I've found that I have to listen to a CD for quite a while before I can tell which polarity is correct. It would be easier to identify the correct polarity with a convenient polarity control which would allow the polarity to be quickly flipped a few times during a passage which is especially sensitive to polarity. Such controls would automatically soft-mute the audio before flipping the polarity, and then un-mute, to protect the system. Some DAC-chips include soft-muting and polarity controls, but these functions are apparently used only on pro-gear. WARNING - If you add a polarity control to your system (such as the example below), do not flip the polarity at high volume levels, or you might damage your system. An example of a simple polarity control is a DPDT light/wall switch with cross-connected throws (throw A+ to throw B-, throw A- to throw B+) in line with each speaker connection - apply the input across the poles and take the output from across the throws, or vice versa. Wall/light switches and suitable enclosures (plastic outlet/switch boxes) are readily available, and the switches have screw terminals and hefty switch contacts. Solder wire terminals on the speaker cables for solid connections. I would avoid using the push-in terminals on the back of the switch at all because they're not solid enough to use as speaker connections, or for the cross-connections on the switches.