From: dave@djmoorenospam.fsnet.co.uk   
      
   Sad news.   
      
   Here's a better copy of the obituary, without the many spurious characters:   
      
   =============================================   
      
   Roger Nichols, who has died aged 66, was an American sound engineer and   
   inventor best known for his work with the jazz-rock group Steely Dan, with   
   whom he produced some of the highest fidelity recordings ever made.   
      
   Nichols worked with the group throughout their heyday in the 1970s and   
   during later sporadic recordings, as the musicians built a peerless   
   reputation for meticulous attention to detail and exceptional clarity of   
   sound.   
      
   He won seven Grammies, six of them for Steely Dan albums, the first being   
   their 1977 masterpiece Aja and, most recently, three awards for Two Against   
   Nature (2000). The other Grammy was for his role as producer of the less   
   fashionable country artist John Denver, with whom he had a close   
   association - based on their mutual passion for gadgets and amateur   
   aviation - from 1980 until Denver's death in a plane crash in 1997.   
      
   Among the other prominent artists on whose records Nichols worked were Bobby   
   "Blue" Bland, Johnny Winter, Ricky Lee Jones, Placido Domingo, Frank   
   Sinatra, Diana Ross, and The Beach Boys.   
      
   During his limited spare time, Nichols was also a Scuba diving instructor   
   and an amateur motor-racing photographer whose work was regularly published.   
   He also designed the Wendel drum machine/sampler, first used in 1979 on   
   Steely Dan's Gaucho album.   
      
   The group's core members, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, nicknamed Nichols   
   "The Immortal" because he mysteriously avoided electrocution in a   
   potentially fatal studio accident. Despite the exacting requirements and   
   excessive workload the band placed on him, he thrived on working with them   
   and their producer Gary Katz.   
      
   "We're all perfectionists," Nichols said in an interview in 1993. "It wasn't   
   a drag for me to do things over and over until it was perfect. In my own   
   way, I'm just as crazy as they are."   
      
   Roger Scott Nichols was born in Oakland, California, on September 22 1944.   
   His father flew B47s in the US Air Force and the family lived all over   
   America, but when he left the military in 1957 they settled at Cucamonga,   
   southern California. There Roger attended the same high school as Frank   
   Zappa, of whose guitar playing he made experimental home-recordings on a   
   basic reel-to-reel deck.   
      
   After graduating in Nuclear Physics at Oregon State University, Nichols   
   worked at the San Onofre nuclear power plant as a nuclear operator from 1965   
   to 1968. He was simultaneously developing a passionate interest in audio   
   equipment, mainly because he hated the "clicks, pops and ticks" he would   
   hear on records.   
      
   With two friends he began making recordings at jazz clubs and built a   
   recording studio in Torrance. They started by recording local high school   
   bands and then set up a hi-fi store supplying custom equipment to music   
   industry professionals, thus making many contacts. Karen Carpenter, Larry   
   Carlton and Kenny Rogers were among clients that used the studio, and they   
   eventually began supplying others, including the ABC network.   
      
   In 1970, ABC hired Nichols to do studio maintenance and engineering, and the   
   following year Katz arrived with the New Yorkers, Becker and Fagen. Since no   
   one else had much notion of how to deal with them, Nichols began working   
   with them, and they instantly found common ground in their dedication to   
   "hi-fi".   
      
   With Katz taking a mostly "executive" role as producer, responsible for   
   getting the best vocal performances out of Fagen, Nichols was responsible   
   for capturing the music on tape, with lustrous results.   
      
   Their first two albums -- Can't Buy A Thrill (1972) and Countdown To Ecstasy   
   (1973) -- were unusual for their lack of EQ (or "equalisation"), a   
   routinely-used technique for manipulating the relative strength of   
   frequencies. Instead, Nichols concentrated on careful microphone placement.   
      
   Another of his ideas that became a Steely Dan trademark was double-tracking   
   Fagen's vocals, and mixing one of the unison doubles at around 75 per cent   
   of the volume of the other. This subtle effect gave his vocals the desired   
   "thickness" without being as obvious as other double tracking methods.   
      
   Steely Dan soon effectively became a duo, spending months recording each of   
   their albums with the cream of LA's session musicians. Their perfectionist   
   approach meant that they never made backup copies of master tapes (since   
   this would inevitably mean a reduction in sound quality). But this sometimes   
   worked against them. During the making of Katy Lied (1975), one of their   
   24-track masters was accidentally erased by an assistant engineer, and a   
   song from the Gaucho sessions was lost in another accident; although the   
   group spent $60,000 trying to re-create it, they finally rejected the   
   results.   
      
   After Steely Dan announced their split, Nichols also worked on Fagen's first   
   solo album, Nightfly (1982), considered a benchmark of quality by   
   audiophiles. For the follow-up Kamakiriad (1993), Nichols said that two   
   years were spent programming the drum machines to get "just the right feel"   
   to meet Fagen's increasingly fastidious standards. The following year   
   Nichols also engineered and mixed Becker's solo debut, 11 Tracks Of Whack.   
   When Steely Dan re-formed, he worked on Alive in America (1995), Two Against   
   Nature and Everything Must Go (2003).   
      
   In his later career Nichols spread his knowledge internationally in "master   
   class workshops" and as a technical consultant. In 2005 he won a National   
   Recording Academy of Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award and set up   
   his company, Roger Nichols Digital.   
   Roger Nichols spent the last year of his life battling pancreatic cancer,   
   treatment for which nearly bankrupted his family. He died on April 9, and is   
   survived by his wife Conrad Reeder, a writer and musician, and by two   
   daughters.   
      
   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8580588/Roger-Nichols.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)