Listening through emotions

"The sound of (Joni Mitchell's) Blue is unfortunately not very good. It is an early ‘70s solid-state recording with the glare, etc. this implies. The Steve Hoffman DCC gold disk sounds the best I have heard. It is remarkably warm, full of life. From an interview with Steve Hoffman a number of years ago with The Abso!ute Sound: “I worked on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, for example. The mastertape and the original LP sound nothing alike. You couldn’t cut what’s on the mastertape onto an LP, her voice is too dynamic. Your stylus at home would have jumped right out of the groove in the old days. To avoid that, the cutting engineer had to compress the dynamic range and change the tonality of the song to get the thing on the album. And No. 1 on Side One would have had a different sound from No.6 on Side One because the closer you get to the center of the record, the harder it is to cut. Even from one song to the next is a whole other thing. With CDs you don’t have these problems. With CDs, it really boils down to how I want it to sound. Whatever I have to do to achieve that sound, I’ll do. Sometimes it’s taking a mastertape that’s solid state, and playing it back on a tube tape recorder. On the Joni Mitchell, that early Seventies solid-state sound is slightly brittle. Adding just one layer of vacuum tubes in there makes her sound much more lifelike. But in another instance, the mastertape might be too muddy, and I’d do the opposite.”