The world’s best “Mastering” “Engineer”

STeVE is conspicuously absent from this thread.. heh

Since I can't think of a better place to put this, here's a possibly stupid question:

What is the consensus at this point as to how much of the stuff credited to Steve as mastering engineer was actually mastered by him? It seems highly unlikely that he was trusted with tapes once his rep spread. His most well-known run that played the most off of the message board user base saw him officially partnered up with Kevin Gray for his most notable work. And once he and Gray split for whatever reason, his work dried up overnight. Outside of the DCC and Audio Fidelity stuff where, if just because of the mistakes, it seems like he was genuinely responsible, how much did he actually do?

He didn't have a minder at MCA, at least nobody that received a credit. Of course, he didn't have a credit on two of his more "lauded" releases, either.

True dat. But it is also the time when tapes started going mysteriously "missing" at MCA.

Don't forget he was there to plug in that mystery tube-y warmth thing into the mastering chain.

This is part of why I asked; it came up when I did that thread where I looked up Steve's press clippings that are available in news databases: stereocentral.freeforums.net/thread/1719/which-waste-hours-articles-steve

There is nothing in the public record about him being a mastering engineer before he started working at DCC. At MCA, it was all about him being an A&R guy who handled back catalog stuff. Nothing technical.

As for there being any sources other than Steve that he was a recording engineer of any kind pre-DCC, there is indeed a Steve Hoffman who was working at KLAC in 1975 on the station's engineering team: imgur.com/a/merry-christmas-from-klac-570-all-staff-los-angeles-times-december-23-1975-OekQse8

But...that's literally the only trace of him having any kind of technical studio job/theoretical skills before DCC.

I wish we had some kind of definitive account of this stuff, because there are so many gaps that lead to new questions. The Hoffman/Gray team-up billing started years before the forum existed (you can find articles going back to at least 1995 and albums with Discogs listings that list them as a team going back a few years earlier). With that in mind, what exactly was Gray getting out sharing his mastering credits with this random weirdo before the forum became a useful marketing tool? Or was Gray ghost-mastering for Hoffman for years before the "team" and this was simply part of a well-paying deal for Gray? Is it simply that Steve's so much of a glory hound that he wanted this very limited late '90s audiophile audience to think of him as responsible for stuff that sounded good in a way that went beyond him encouraging his employers to find and use actual master tapes? 

Also, when it comes to the KG Blue Notes...is the belief that Steve did NOTHING on the Music Matters 45RPM stuff and they got better starting with the Music Matters 33RPM series because Kevin leveled up his equipment when he left RTI/AcousTech and started Cohearant? Or is it that KG had to use some of Steve's dumb EQ advice? (Or both?)