20191101: Dear KMAG Open Thread

Oh man… this is horrible, much worse than I even knew about.
I used to spend a lot of time on the Steve Hoffman website, he is a mastering engineer who specialized in mostly classic rock (but also Jazz and other genres) reissues.
He was (and is) very ‘sensitive’ to the ‘loudness wars’ and ‘brickwall filtering’ and ‘compression’ and all the other digital tricks that suck the LIFE out of music.
The earliest digital transfers to CD of 60s and 70s classic rock music that were done in the early 1980s were basically straight transfers, often from the tape that was equalized for LP, without messing around with anything, because the digital tools (like ‘Pro Tools’) didn’t exist yet.
This is why so many of the original CD issues of 60s and 70s classic rock on CD from the early 1980s sound so much more ‘natural’ than remastered reissues of the same music from the 1990s and 2000s.
What Steve Hoffman did (and does) is AVOID all of the digital processing that makes music sound digital and lifeless, AND he does everything possible to acquire the original Master Tape, as opposed to the copy tapes (second or third generation, which each successive generation losing fidelity) that are normally used… because big corporations DON’T CARE ABOUT THE MUSIC, so they use whatever tape is most convenient.
So for example, Hoffman was commissioned to remaster Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ in the early or mid 1990s for the DCC reissue label, which Hoffman worked for and/or partly owned. They released their reissues on 24K gold plated CDs, like Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs (MFSL) did.
But Hoffman wouldn’t do the work until he had the actual original Master Tape. It took several years to get it. The studio kept sending him different copy tapes, and he kept sending them back. Eventually the original was found in Ian Anderson’s (lead singer for Jethro Tull) possession, IIRC. Anderson agreed to send the original master tape to Hoffman.
Hoffman has the old playback machines for mastering, I think “Studer” is one of the equipment names, all-tube electronics, with the equalization curves and other adjustments set to what they were originally in the 1960s and 1970s, before everything was transistorized.
So he has the original master tape, and he is playing it back on vintage tube equipment, and ‘mastering’ the music to sound as it sounded originally, as the artist intended. If he is doing an LP reissue, he equalizes for LP, and if he is doing a CD reissue, he equalizes for digital, but he uses NO artificial compression, unless compression was used in the original recording. He uses NO brickwall filters. And the music ‘breathes’ and causes no listening fatigue, because the dynamic range was left INTACT, instead of having everything at the same volume level, so the softest parts are lower in volume, and the loudest parts are louder in volume, as real music is, but UNLIKE most digitally mastered music today, which is squashed and compressed so that every note and transient is the same volume level.
I’m sure I’m not describing some of this with technical accuracy, and I may not be using all of the correct terminology, I’m not a mastering engineer and I have never used the digital manipulation tools, but I spent a lot of time on the music forums learning about what was ‘wrong’ with the sound of modern music and most modern reissues of classic rock music, for the purpose of seeking out the best ‘sounding’ versions of my favorite music.
Most if not all of Hoffman’s remasters are long out of print now, so you have to find them on places like eBay, where they might cost anywhere from $30 to $200 depending on the title. To get the kind of control he needed to ‘do it right’, they would have to negotiate and buy the rights upfront, for a specific quantity of CDs (or occasionally LPs) produced, usually 5,000 units or less. Then they would recoup their investment from the sales. So by its nature, it was always a ‘limited edition’ scenario, but the results were usually worth it, because most of Hoffman’s remasters sound better than any other digital version. There are some SACDs and other hi-rez reissues that occasionally beat Hoffman’s efforts, and there are some original Japan or West German CD pressings (first commercial CD pressing plants in the world) from 1981-1982 that are as good or slightly better, but you can hardly ever go wrong with a Steve Hoffman mastered reissue/remaster.
Steve Hoffman was one of the few who loved the music from the 60s and 70s enough to want to do it right, and because he was essentially an ‘independent’, he could do it RIGHT without corporate higher-ups calling the shots, which is what usually happens to even the best mastering engineers in the business besides Hoffman.
But brickwall filtering and compression issues are bad enough. What the guy in the video you posted is talking about is a complete manipulation of the music itself. It is purposely removing the HUMAN ELEMENT, the very lack of human imprecision that imparts ‘feeling’ and ‘life’, the sense of a real musician playing in a real space, and replaces it with digital ‘perfection’ that removes the human element.
It’s BORG music!
Practically muzak!
And now I understand the term ‘flying in’ that was referenced in your video. That term was used a lot on the Steve Hoffman music forum years ago when I used to spend a lot of time there, but I didn’t really understand it until now.
The way they record a chorus ONCE, and then just DUPLICATE it digitally for every other place in the song is like assembly-line manufacturing of music, which isn’t music at all, it’s a facsimile at best.
For example, in ‘real’ music, each chorus that is sung SOUNDS unique — maybe a little louder with more emphasis on the last chorus than the first, for example — because each chorus was sung as part of a musical WHOLE, and real human beings don’t perfectly and exactly duplicate the chorus each time, the way the computerized / digitized music does.
One of the things that MAKES music enjoyable is the sense of ‘liveness’, even the in-studio recordings, because real people — warts and all — are singing and performing. That’s why they would do MULTIPLE takes, sometimes even 20 or 30, or more, before they got the one that everybody said “that’s IT!”.
On many of the deluxe box set reissues of class albums coming out in recent years, they include multiple takes, which are fascinating to listen to, to see how the song developed, as they worked on it, or changed one thing or the other, and how they arrived at ‘the one’.
And most of the time, they did choose the best ‘take’ that ended up on the official album. You can hear the difference between the extra ‘something’ in the best take, and the comparatively ‘flat’ or uninspired takes.
But digitizing everything and digitally ‘fixing’ everything so that it is mathematically ‘perfect’ but devoid of the HUMAN element is… it’s a desecration of the art form.
This video explained a lot, thanks very much for posting it 👍