Expecting Rain

if i may be of technical assistance you can use the upside down >><<, which will allow you to overrride the quote button. how you make them <<>> go upside down tho, is a mystery.

Hoffman is notorious for dubious claims, and has had a few issues with various labels about "borrowed" tapes. As a matter of fact, Universal won't simply work with him, and Sony now sends him copies, either DAT or analog.

On his own vanity forum, Hoffman tells lots of long stories about how his dog ate chocolate or how taxing it is to be best friends with LeAnn Rimes, but strangely doesn't have any time to give a clear answer to people who ask him there about the master tapes for the Greatest Hits album.

And he's actually not a mastering engineer. Hoffman almost always works in combination with another credited guy, who's actually the engineer (during years, Kevin Gray, these days, Stephen Marsh). He's mostly a consultant about EQ during the mastering. He did have some positive impact about a few practices in the early days of CD transfers, promoting the use of 1st generation master tapes, but he's now one of the numerous guys who coast on some decade-old fame.

...and yet, his work still sounds better than just about anyone's out there...

DAT? I didn't know that was still used in professional settings (though probably some hobbyists still do, almost no format dies in hobby land.)

good luck in finding out which tapes he used. i think it would be a gas if it turned out he used a store bought cd. or even better from a 'vintage' 8 track tape.

i betya that cat of his gonna be eating caviar soon.

After some Googling I managed to access the thread on that 'vanity site' because I don't have an account there.

Didn't see much of anything at all except literally page after page after page of people posting their online ordering information and stuff. One person found it for two cents less, one for three three cents more, etc. Jeez.

That "vanity site" is home to some of the most useful in-depth comparisons of different masterings and pressings of albums and details of their sonic assets and flaws you will find anywhere on the internet. It's a very valuable resource.

I was just trying to search out salient info on this Greatest Hits CD.

Can't vouch for the rest.

Says here that the analog masters were put through the new Kensei Audio Transformer, whatever that is.

http://www.musicdirect.com/p-89517-bob-dylan-bob-dylans-greatest-hits-gold-cd.aspx

He put out some good stuff on the DCC label fifteen or twenty years ago. His recent remasters for Audio Fidelity are more miss than hit. Most of his fame also comes from the Emperor's New Clothes cult around him. For instance, one of his Doors CD had audible clicks. Somebody on his forum mentioned it and Hoffman replied that it was due to the guy's system not being resolving enough. The more resolving a system is, the smoother the CD would sound...

On the GH album, Hoffman's claims are close to grandiloquence. This is the album for which Dylan will be reminded, and he's giving us the definitive version.



I mentioned DAT because it was responsible for one of the strangest events in Hoffmanistan. A few years ago, Hoffman bragged about his Roy Orbison CD being the first to be straight out of the original master tapes. It turned out that the Sony guy who had "helped" Hoffman then was now working for rival Mobile Fidelity and had an account on his forum. He corrected Hoffman and explained he had done the transfers himself, then sent a DAT to Hoffman. The post was removed, the account was closed, and the MoFi bashing is the official sport on the forum now, the biggest expert being a guy who had his system wired out of phase for years...

More recently, there was another polemic with an actual Nashville engineer who had fallen out of favor with Hoffman. The guy claimed, months after being banned, that some Simon & Garfunkel Gold CD that Audio Fidelity released was basically the '80s CD re-EQ'd, as all the tracks synced perfectly (If you do a new transfer from analog tapes, there will always be a few milliseconds of difference in tracks, as two different tape machines don't have the same exact speed). He was sued by Audio Fidelity and settled out of court by removing all offending mention of his claims, but nobody so far has proven him wrong.

The guy had anyway been pushed to his limits. His posts on the forum had been re-edited to make him look more aggressive, courtesy of the host himself. It was confirmed by a former forum moderator.

Of course, there's still some useful information to find there, as it's one of the only places where people compare different versions of the same albums with some seriousness. I still have an active account, for instance. But many valuable contributors have left due to heavy censorship and the place has turned into a cesspool for sycophants and guys who're convinced that "flat transfer" is the answer for everything.



If Mark Wilder is mentioned, that means that some work was actually done on that project.

The dog story about chocolate is that one of his dogs had eaten a large bag of M&M's that he had forgotten about after Halloween. And chocolate is poisonous to dogs. Rather than bringing her to the vet or keeping her in the garage, they let her in their living room and she threw up everywhere during the night, ruining the carpets they had spent $1,000 to clean a few days before. He explains that his wife was even in tears...

Am I kidding? Actually, not:

http://stereocentral.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=5018




The good stuff (mostly about Hoffman's various encounters with Hollywood legends) is usually in the "Off-Topic" section that non-members cannot see.

But there's the long letter of praise written by "music biz legend Ernie Campagna who basically ran A&M back in the day":

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showp ... tcount=215

Campagna is actually one of the two permanent employees at Audio Fidelity (Hoffman is just contracted) and is in charge of the artwork.

From what I've been able to understand, Hoffman is basically a trust fund kid who fancies himself as the only worthy translator of the magic lying in master tapes recordings. He definitely has (or rather had) a good ear, and put some extra care in cult albums, while the record companies would do transfers by the truckload during the 80s and 90s by their house teams, before adding too much compression and limitation to recent releases. Sound was never their actual priority. Bonus tracks, packaging and promo have always sold more.

But it's more a hobby for Hoffman than an actual job. George Marino, who mastered Led Zeppelin in the 90s and who was in charge of the surround layer on the Dylan SACD remasters, passed out a few days ago. Even when he was fighting cancer, he still did several major releases a month. Hoffman does a reissue from a 60s, 70s or 80s album a month, and that's it. And it's always with another guy in the room.

Sorry if this sounds quite harsh. I have never had a personal beef with Hoffman, even if I've spent too much time having fun over his attitude or about some of the lemmings who haunt his forum. And, more importantly, too much stuff in hi-fi is self-delusion. Even if this limited Greatest Hits ends sounding great, does that mean, as implied, that every release of Bob's music from the 60s had zero power and didn't bring the true energy of the original recordings? Of course, not.

If you need a high-end system and an audiophile pressing of a particular album to fully appreciate an artist, the problem isn't with the recording or the mastering, it is about you. As the guitar player from Radiohead once said, "hi-fi is just about middle-aged men trying to make music sound as good as it did when they were teenagers, and it never will. They'll never be as excited as they were when they first heard that music coming out of just one speaker. They'll never get that close to it again."

Of course, some masterings are better than others, some are just a chore to listen to (because of the "loudness war", or an intrusive use of DNR), but when some guy claims you really need to hear (and buy) his mastering, because he's the first one to really get what makes Dylan great, the only sane attitude is to ask him back how this Dylan guy could actually have a career and fans without the help of a particular mastering guy.



No way! Is that a copy-paste from another project? Because if the Kensei Audio Transformer is back, it's definitely the biggest joke ever tried by Hoffman.

It was mentioned three or four years ago for a series of Audio Fidelity remasters. It's apparently some kind of Japanese prototype. But it's so secret that when Hoffman spoke about it, he never said if it was an A/D converter, or whatever function the device served in the audio chain. Nobody actually saw the device or could say if there's an actual company or engineer named Kensei. And there's no other Kensei Audio Transformer in use anywhere else.

Draw your own conclusions...

...


all you had to do was read the blurb and you would know what the conclusion would be.
was kensei first name sensai?

one time i took the kid to karate class there was going to be a VIP sensei, when he came out it was some good old boy from Tennessee that weighed about 300 lbs. only way he could knock you out was by sitting on you. i was skeptical about the sensei but was told to hush, as he used to train Elvis.
this scene here reminds me of that affair.

I have some of those DCC discs, a couple of which I actually bought when they were new. Dylan's Highway 61 DCC as I just mentioned recently, in another post here, has got to the best stereo version on CD.

I haven't been interested enough in the titles that Audio Fidelity has been offering to buy any of them to see what they're like. A lot of them are common pop / rock warhorses that you can find in the dollar used LP bins or thrift stores.

very informative, thank you for you frank and incisive comments. when you been around a little bit in the music thing you know that the remastering scene are some fast cats. bobs material is fine as is.

musta caught that semantic entropy offa some bob record. im just tryin to help the peeps here keep their green, but they can make it rain in the sunshine if they want. no problem for me.

ive been to the shark tank a few times, i can tell when it aint flipper swimmin at me.[/quote]
Nah. I wasn't saying anything about the content of your post. Just how crazy everything said up that point sounded to me. And you do have a way of mixing home spun phrases with psychedelic thinking which can make for a deep read. Of course, having just finished the post by Deaf Boy Grunt, all that master of the mastering remaster stuff all sounds even crazier.

[/quote]

the learned Mr Grunt, simply stated what my orginal suspicions were. i had tried to be succint and clear, and save folks like Mr Grunt all that typing and quoting and research.

like that old song says

if the ocean was rye whiskey
and i was a duck
id dive to the bottom
and never come up

To be fair, we have NO proof that what Hoffman did for this new disc was simply take an old 1980's CD of Greatest Hits
and run it through the Kefai Audio Transporger.

But if he did, some one who bought it will probably suss it out.

All this audiophile stuff is beyond me, I'm just surprised to hear there are people out there who actually prefer jewel cases. I don't think I've had one over the years what hasn't ended up cracked or where the little thingys which hold the CD in place haven't snapped off. Plus the booklets are always a bugger to get in and out. Give me a digipak every time, look much smarter too.

Who the heck said anything like that, though? All I heard anyone say is hey, there's going to be a new re-release of a classic Dylan title done by a guy known for meticulous tape selection and mastering, and it's sure to contain original mixes and sound great. Do you need it if you're perfectly satisfied with the version you already have, or with not having any version? Of course not. No one's holding a gun to anyone's head saying "you have to buy this!" But it's going to be out there to buy if anyone wants it. Surely that's not a bad thing, although the reaction of some seems to be that it is, and such a very bad thing that it's worth denigrating the value not only of this release but the whole body of work of the person doing it, and even the entire philosophy behind such work, over. The phrase "pearls before swine" comes to mind.

I have no love of lemmings myself, either. But there are lemmings on every forum you'll ever visit. Do you fancy this one an exception?

^
Nobody here said that, it was said by whomever wrote the description of the remaster.

Interesting, Deaf Boy Grunt, thanks for the info. A while back, I read this link (maybe got it from an ER thread, I can't remember):

http://robertmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04 ... forum.html

Agree, though, that the Steve Hoffman forums are a very useful resource for comparisons between different releases. And I do like that Highway 61 DCC master. Some of the other masters of his that I've heard are too flat and dull for my taste.

so these remastering fellows have followers? hoffmanites?

He seems to favor the rich (even colored) euphonic kind of sound that may fall easy on the ears, but may also be at the cost of transparency. That quality you hear on certain masterings, where it seems like someone threw the studio or xoncert hall doors open, and you can walk right into the sound.

the DCC gold remaster does indeed sound great.....compare it to what was available at the time and you can hear it in an A-B comparison .....although the sony /columbia SACD (which came out much later) sounds as good, because he found the "real" source tape when they let him have access to there vaults ......the whole time prior to this discovery sony didn't use the "real" source tapes for
hwy61 revisited and who knows what others ..........there was an article in The Telegraph (dylan fanzine) years ago where hoffman talks of this.

if in fact he schooled sony /columbia on how to recognize the "real thing" .....well we can thank him for that can't we ?

all those remasters and sacd etc sound funny to me, no low end and the vocal in your face, unfunky. i need low end cant do without it.
how did he school them,this i gotta hear.
because if i read him right, he couldnt find any of the stereo masters of the albums that have songs on GH which a good number of them.