"S888Wheel" wrote in message
...
You may not need to do anything other than press a button to master a CD
but
mastering is an art and IMO Steve Hoffman is one of the best. I have
purchased
every one of the new Jazz reissues he talks about above and to my ears
they are
far and away the best version of each title I have ever heard.
Interstingly
enough Steve Hoffman is a major advocate of one particular SET amplifier.
I
have not had the oppurtunity to hear that particular amp, The WAVAC 833,
but I
think it would make for interesting listening.
Steve Hoffman is an excellent mastering engineer. No doubt. I got some CDs
of his from the mid 80s that still are the best I've heard and his work with
DCC brought forth some great releases.
However, I have some credibility problems with him.
Here are a couple of interesting quotes from Steve taken from this interview
in 1997 when he was heavily into mastering CDs:
[quote]
DMG - Maybe, though with higher resolution formats there might be more
detail...
Steve - You know, when you say higher resolution, I get scared. To me,
higher resolution means Krell. It's like, how much is there anyway? Lets say
the Lourve museum loans you the Mona Lisa for a couple of days. Ok, so
here's the Mona Lisa. Where do you show it? Do you hang it up in the house
with a nice, soft light? Or do you take it outside with the sun shining on
it, where all you're going to see are the scratches and cracks. How much
resolution is there? The less resolution there is on that, the better its
going to look. That's my only fear. When you look at a piece of color
printing, and all you see are colored dots all over the page, you wonder how
much resolution was there to begin with. When you listen to the Beatles' I
Want To Hold Your Hand on a really good system, it's disappointing. It's not
a sonic masterpiece. It's a good song, but not a great recording. So, words
like 'higher resolution' to me, scare me a little bit.
DMG - Most of the audio bandwith can be handled very well by 16bit CD.
Steve - Yes.
[UNQUOTE]
and
[quote]
DMG - So, is 20 or 24 bit going to get to a level where the emotion is
completely gone through more imperfections being brought out?
Steve - That's exactly why higher resolution scares me. With higher res on
that recording, you're going to hear more high end that shouldn't be there.
People would be surprised if they had a meter hooked up to their system and
could see that on 90% of their records and discs, above 9500K, there's
nothing there. What you're hearing up there is tape hiss, or some other
thing that isn't part of the music. When you extend everything up to that
range, there's nothing up there but noise. DMG - Well, it seems people don't
want to admit that their hearing basically falls off dramatically around 13
or 14k.
Steve - Not only that, but the famous Neumann mikes have a giant peak around
6k, and from there it's all downhill. You know, you have to examine what it
is you want from music, and if you're one of those people that relies on
charts or instrument readings, and you say, 'Well, my system reproduces from
5 cycles to 9 million cycles'. Well, that's great, but you sure aren't
hearing it. Numbers aren't everything. You have to trust your ears, and I
always tell people that.
[UNQUOTE]
And here is what he had to say WRT to vinyl:
[quote]
DMG - And all because they've made the American components so expensive,
it's so
much easier for people to put their money on Japanese products. What else
do you use at
home?
Steve - I use a pre-amp, it's called a Joule Electra, it's made by Jud
Barber in South
Carolina. I also have a pair of Australian speakers called Whatmough 202's,
and a lot of
other things that come in and out all the time. I use a Well-Tempered
turntable, though I
haven't been playing all that many records. I've been really spoiled. Once
you hear the
master of some great album, it's you know, really hard to play the record
and go, 'yeah,
that sounds really good'. So, I'm really spoiled that way. I don't want to
spend a lot of
money on a turntable that runs with a piece of dental floss.
[UNQUOTE]
The whole interview is here
http://home.earthlink.net/~mercmoon/hoffmanint.htm
And something he told me when I asked him about his mastering of Elvis' In
The Ghetto:
[quote]
I transferred IN THE GHETTO flat from the two-track master mix. The DCC
version is how the actual tape sounds.
[UNQUOTE]
Now though, he is heavily into SACD mastering, and the master tapes which he
has spent close to 20 years listening to and digitizing has suddenly seen a
*sharp* rise in dynamic range.
[quote]
GoldenGuy,
The boundaries of Digital PCM have already been pushed to their limit if I
play back a master tape vs. the PCM copy and hear things like echo fall off
on the digital. If they sounded the same in an A/B all our problems would be
over and my job would be so much easier.
[UNQUOTE]
The whole thread is he
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/sh...2530&highlight
=Whats+the+Worst+thing+about+SACDs
And in this thread
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/sh...9886&highlight
=sacd
he snaps at somebody nicknamed Pepzhez for really just putting forth some of
the same thoughts that Steve had in the 1997 interview:
[quote]
Do SACD's and CD's sound different? Sure.
Does the sound of the CD layer and the DSD layer sound different on an SH
mastered SACD Hybrid?
Well, tonally they should sound the same. The resolution factor kicks in on
the DSD layer and you can hear "in" to the mix better; in other words, much
better ambiance retrieval.
[UNQUOTE]
Read into it what you will.
________
Thom