Steve Hoffman (audio engineer)

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Steve Hoffman is a mastering engineer.


As a teenager, Steve Hoffman co-wrote and recorded as a musician (drums and guitar) the 1964 surf rock instrumental "Cecilia Ann" with childhood friend Charles "Frosty" Horton, under the moniker of The Surftones. The track wasn't released until the late 80s, but gained popularity when it was covered by the Pixies as the opener on their 1990 album Bossanova. In the early '70s, Hoffman worked in radio and earned a degree in mass communications from California State University, Northridge. During the late '70s, Hoffman joined MCA Records as catalog research and development coordinator. For the next decade, he was responsible for compiling hundreds of budget cassette releases for MCA's Special Products division. His primary focus was on jazz and big band recordings.

In 1985 he worked on a series of releases aimed at the CD market which bore the title "From the Original Master Tapes." This series included works of artists such as Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and John Coltrane. He later departed from MCA, and has plied his trade with the Dunhill Compact Classics and Audio Fidelity labels, owned by Marshall Blonstein, former vice president of Ode Records.

Hoffman has also worked with other labels on occasion, including Analogue Productions, Rural Rhythm, Razor & Tie, and S&P. In 2014, Hoffman remastered the Rolf Harris back catalogue for Audio Fidelity.


His approach to remastering varies, but generally his method of transferring the tapes is minimalist. He occasionally has to make adjustments depending on the quality of the tape source and the equalization choices of the mixing engineer. He attains this by avoiding compression, limiting, and noise reduction; and by adding "colorations" via tube gear (using from one to five layers of distortion),[1] and/or using subtractive equalization.[1][2][3][4]

The Picks' overdubs[edit]

In February 1984, Hoffman sent what are known as safety copies of several Buddy Holly master recordings to John Pickering of The Picks[5] who took them to Sound Masters studios in Houston, Texas. There, the reunited group overdubbed new vocal parts onto at least 60 recordings, and sent them back to Hoffman at MCA. The belief was that, under Hoffman's influence, MCA would have issued these "new" recordings as an album,[5] perhaps to commemorate the 25th year since Holly's death. This did not occur and in 1992, Pickering approached Viceroy Records to arrange a deal for nationwide distribution of these overdubbed recordings, but MCA made it clear that Pickering did not have legal clearance to release such recordings.[5]


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