steve hoffman forums, C or D?

i was actually curious which remaster of soft machine third sounded best and it got to like page three or four of the steve hoffman thread before everyone in it realized the album was poorly recorded and so there's no clear or ideal master of it

it was sorta like the whole board was summarized v neatly for me there, people arrogantly throwing around a lot of knowledge presumably gleaned from very intense, detail-oriented listening, which turns out to be largely meaningless and inapplicable

yeah but they are helpful about a lot of others, it can be handy!

...it's definitely not the place to find a quick recommendation for replacement lp jackets/sleeves etc. now THAT is a totally obnoxious and unhelpful stevehoffman rabbit hole

oh i don't mean to suggest they aren't occasionally helpful, especially with finding good unremixed copies of catalogues that have been remastered and remixed (cf. genesis)

I'm still looking forward to Egypt Station!

Me too - particularly since, at this point, each McCartney album increasingly looks as if it may be his last. I didn't rate New as highly as Chaos and Creation... or Memory Almost Full, but there was enough on there for me to enjoy.

I've gotten some great stereo system advice on there fwiw.

TBF the title of that thread changed once it was clear what the name of the album would be; that thread has been running for a few years ever since the sessions were first rumored to be happening.

also, finally, the massive proliferation of beatles threads has dampened my interest in that forum. I dealt with it for years but at this point it just seems to be trodding over old ground every day

on the other hand

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i was actually curious which remaster of soft machine third sounded best and it got to like page three or four of the steve hoffman thread before everyone in it realized the album was poorly recorded and so there's no clear or ideal master of it

― princess of hell (BradNelson)

surprised it took that long, yeah the whole album is legendarily awful sounding. i don't know what the hell they did to those tapes to get them to sound so bad.

also I think the answer to that question is that the latest remaster/reissue sounds the best. not sure what they did to it but it doesn't sound good, but sounds better than the cd I used to have

Which version of The Fall’s “Dragnet” sounds the best?

also, finally, the massive proliferation of beatles threads has dampened my interest in that forum.

I'm familiar with this feeling

xpost

all of them :)

Hoffman's response to the Peter Shelley RIP thread is jaw-droppingly cuntish and continues to sink to newer lows several pages in
detailed breakdown of the misery starts at the bottom of this page:
http://stereocentral.freeforums.net/thread/3/rip?page=37

i think that he's being misinterpreted. I looked @ that thread the morning after PS passed and at that time it appeared that the OP didn't put Buzzcocks in the thread title. so (in a dickish way) i think he was just trying to make that person clarify who died since i think there's a poet w/the same name

tbf, he is (being) a grumpy sod.

"think he was just trying to make that person clarify who died since i think there's a poet w/the same name"

Percy Shelley died in 1822

He's only just heard though.

Hoffman's posts are so awful in that thread, his is the first reply with simply "Who is he?", which is hard to find an angle where it can't be read disrespectfully. He spends the next few pages raging on about the importance of titling a thread properly, before realising that Pete Shelley was actually an important and much-loved figure, prompting him to pull out "I knew him in the 80s and tried to help him out financially" six pages in, seemingly out of nowhere

the guy has some serious ego issues

I found it useful for trivia. For example there's a thread about albums released on DAT - the only one I knew was Substance, the New Order compilation, but there are others. Such as Kylie Minogue's first album(!):
https://www.discogs.com/Kylie-Minogue-Kylie/release/8856256

DAT was a digital tape format from 1988 or so that recorded at 48khz. Never took off commercially but was popular in the broadcasting world in the years before burning a CDr was practical. Worthless now. Replaced in the studio by ADAT, which used VHS tapes, which was then replaced by hard disc recording and software instruments.

What else did I learn from Steve Hoffman's forums? Early Blue Note records have a deep groove in the label. Some records were made out of styrene, which was more easily damaged than vinyl. Early versions of the bezel had a dot over the ninety. The Japanese PlayStation had a slightly smaller controller. Columbia was slightly heavier than the later shuttles because it was originally designed to carry a liquid fuelled rocket in the cargo bay. Between Egypt and Sudan there's an 800-square-mild chunk of land called Bir Tawil that is unclaimed by either country because when the maps were drawn up the lines didn't match. I'm digressing here. Some of those things I learned elsewhere.

As with discogs.com my impression of the participants is that their musical taste is awful - it's always jazz/blues-rock, never Autechre - but ultimately it's not a music forum, it's a music technology forum, just as discogs is an eBay seller forum. After a while I felt like screaming "you're an old man; your hearing is shot; it's a physical inevitability; you've wasted a fortune on audio gear that you can't hear properly; no, you can't run faster than a young man; you're full of shit" but I doubt they would have heard me on account of the hearing loss.

Conversely IlXor *does* have a wealth of musical knowledge but as with the pre-Kinja AV Club the frustrating thing is that it's hard to write about music so discussions tend to drift off into space. I hate it when discussions move from the topic, which in this case is ejection seats, because some early jet fighters had downwards-firing ejection seats. One moment you're debating whether it's a good idea to put decorations on the *other* side of the Christmas tree - the one that faces the wall - and the next moment you're left wondering if the Austin Allegro could have been a better car with a hatchback and a subtle redesign. Battlecruisers, yay or nay?

To this day I have no idea who Steve Hoffman is, or was. I have a mental image of one of those anonymous studio people from Los Angeles who proudly lists his work with Mr Mister, Toto, and Heart; the kind of person whose website has a photo of him standing next to music legend Bill Bottrell. *The* Bill Bottrell! Oh yes, him. The musical world's equivalent of a professional grouter.

great post. the pedantic nerd in me kinda loves this stuff: hearing the small differences between this pressing and that one, getting into all the incidental technical details, etc etc

Hoffman himself seems pretty awful

they actually do have a small contingent of Autechre fans, by the way :)

Discogs has a large Autechre contingent as it started out as an electronic music database. Also as a participant there I can say that musical taste is as varied as can possibly be and it's still at least as much about nerdery and collecting as selling.

yeah, there's a lot of Autechre talk on that forum, for one thing

Hoffman (right):
http://www.stevehoffman.info/pic/cc_steve.jpg
TBF he created the best mastering that exists of Highway 61 Revisited and has done a great job on a bunch of other recordings.
but also
https://cdn.head-fi.org/a/3593451.jpg
(endorsing a bizarre piece of wood you stand in your room to make music sound better, I am not joking)

sorry, I forgot the wiggle stick image was already itt

had no idea discogs had a forum

In the second pic, which one is Hoffman?

I ignored it for years. It's mainly abkut the mechanics / politics of the database. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of specialist Group forums on Discogs although many are wastelands. Electronic Music has about 20,000 members, though.

MatthewK - the second photo needs a Hoffman (Left) caption. (haha xp)

lol

(You have insufficient privileges to reply here.)

jerks.

You are insufficiently privileged to reply here.

I found such behavior sad for a senior citizen.

Xpost that is usually because the thread is locked (for going off topic, political snark, etc)

"I was alive at the time. I was there. I remember his plane crash at the high school". I pointed out that yes it's a shame we lost 2 bright stars- Valens and Buddy Holly.

I get that The Big Bopper was a DJ with a novelty hit, but damn that's cold.

I have discovered the stereocentral forum which is a good laugh though it's really a Hoffman boards slambook.

lol really? audiophile mastering beef

Didn't think I'd see a thread dedicated to that forum. Honestly, the feuding that's gone on over there has been the saddest spectacle I've ever witnessed on the internet. It's even spilled out into Wikipedia, and I imagine whoever runs it is shaking their heads, wondering "why the hell are all these people waging this ongoing edit war on a page over a mastering engineer?" It's really sad yet fascinating how it's snowballed over the years, eventually ensnaring renowned engineers like Ken Scott (the Beatles, David Bowie's glam rock albums). The low point was when it came out that Hoffman had a reputation for stealing and/or neglecting to return masters, which is how he got fired from his previous job with MCA.

Anyway, it's heavily populated by complete nuts, and I don't mean obsessive collectors, just socially dysfunctional malcontents. But there are a few highly knowledgeable people who have come and gone through there, and it's worth searching the site once in a while if you need vital record info, especially if it's related to mastering, masters/sources used, etc. Just be sure you get the right info from the right people posting. It's especially edifying if it's coming from people who work in the business. (The great Motown engineer Bob Olhsson actually posts there once in a while, and thankfully he comes off as a very sane and likable person.)

One can go on forever about all the negatives - I mean, sweet Jesus, it actually spawned another forum that exists solely to mock it - but on the positive side, I guess it took highly esoteric but really good information about how masters, records, CD's, SACD's, etc. sound the way they do and made people more knowledgeable about it. In some cases to an unhealthy degree, but it can be nice when you realize it can save you a good deal of $$$ when you get in the habit of skipping remasters of music you already own because they actually sound worse than what you already have.

god i had such a good laugh reading your post, it’s all so painfully true. thank you

sadly, I would definitely read a juicy Hoffman expose lol

https://vintagerock.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/steve_hoffman_interview.jpg

https://vintagerock.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/steve_hoffman_interview.jpg

here's that slam forum: https://stereocentral.freeforums.net. Like I said, some of it is good reading, particularly the stuff they snag before it's deleted where some SHF posters go off into really awful right-wing political shit.

anybody wanna explain what the hell is going with that forum?

i'm out of the loop and seriously confused by all of this.

discovering that forum makes me wonder where the anti-ilx forum is

it's called ilx

ha.

Austin, i wish i could help but i don't think i know anything you don't know. birdistheword's post sort of sums it up pretty well i think.

yup. I visit about once a month and the threads on bands I'm really interested in have been pretty helpful.