dCS Legends: Al Schmitt and Steely Dan’s Aja | The Vinyl Anachronist

When I first read about the dCS Legends series, which celebrates Grammy-winning engineers, I was surprised at just how many of these classic recordings I own and how I have a personal story for almost every one. When you glance at this list, you see Al Schmitt‘s name at the top, and that always reminds me that he had a lot to do with making Steely Dan’s Aja such an iconic recording. Over the years I’ve owned several versions of Aja–if I remember correctly, it was the second Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs LP I ever bought, right after Supertramp’s Crime of the Century. Strangely enough, I no longer own the MoFi LP. I have the MoFi CD, and an old LP that I found at a flea market that wound up being in fair condition at best. I do play that Steely Dan CD a lot, but one day I will find a killer remaster on vinyl. When I bought the MoFi LP back in the late ’70s, I wasn’t really a Steely Dan fan. The only reason I purchased it–at the whopping cost of $17.99–was because my buddy Dan was standing next to me at Licorice Pizza when I […]