I just stumbled upon this thread, and thought I would add a few of my comments and observations re. Sheffield Labs:
* I went to UC Santa Barbara (undergrad) during the mid 1980s and worked pt for a computer equipment store in Santa Barbara. One of our customers at that time was Sheffield Labs. At the time, I didn't realize how significant their work was, but it was that encounter that led me on my stereo journey.
* The Sheffield Labs studio was located on Sheffield Drive, Montecito, CA just a bit South of downtown Santa Barbara, CA. It was a bit rural, and subsequently became very expensive ...like Woodside in the Bay Area with home "compounds".
* On some of the albums and covers you will see a bell tower; I could be wrong but I think that was a reference to the UC Santa Barbara bell tower, Stork Tower.
* I drove on Sheffield Drive about 5 years ago, almost 38 years later; it was difficult to tell from memory the exact location but the homes in that area are now walled compounds...but I am pretty sure I know the former physical location, plus or minus one or two houses either way.
* The computer system I installed/configured was used for the back office, and they gave me a tour of the "house" studio but did not allow me into the recording room or onto the floor stage. There were windows into the recording room and the "floor". The house, I think, was on a steep drop off, so the "floor" was down stairs. Not a big floor....maybe a large "parlor room". I never got to see the famous direct to disc lathe that Sax engineered / used. The photographs in the first three Lincoln Mayorga's and Distinguished Colleagues album covers typically show all the musicians really close together....that was a relatively small space to put all those musicians to sit and play in...especially Mayorga's studio musician lineup.
* When I listen to Mayorga's first three albums and listen to the layered musical staging depth and separation, I think about what I saw from upstairs; the musicians were really close for the aforementioned reason...but the layers of musicians front to back and side to side is quite revealing, to me, given that room size.
* My wife plays violin (although she is a physician) she used to teach violin and was first chair; she subsequently taught at the elementary school to help out and still plays; I practice and play piano (Steinway O) jazz and classical daily, and still take piano lessons; younger son plays tenor Yamaha sax and piano; older son used to play marimba (we had a full size Yamaha marimba in our music room during Covid19 while he was in high school), xylophone, chimes, bells, tympani, and various other percussion drum instruments. All of this gear was/is in our music room along with our stereo gear; this was by design so that we can hear songs played and then be able to practice to the style, expressiveness, memorization work, timing, dynamics, etc. My kids and wife are definitely not audiophiles....spotify on an iphone is about as good as it gets for my wife and the kids normal music consumption (I do not consider myself an audiophile A/B testing gear, but I do have reasonable tube gear and albums ). As a result, we all agree that when we hear the aforementioned Sheffield Lab music...especially from Mayorga's first 3 albums ...these generally sound materially better, in our system and to our ears, relative to other recordings that I have; YMMV. Mayorga's America "West Side Story" is a real favorite for us because of the numerous instruments played that we play as well (the triangles played in this song are the most accurate reproduction relative to the actual triangles we had in our music room. Sheffield's percussion album, which I also have, is also the best reproduction of these instruments in our system and to our ears. We feel like we are in the studio listening to this set; of course the dynamics will never be as good as being at Yoshi's in Oakland of course (I have taken the entire family to many jazz concerts at Yoshi's...such as Joey Alexander pre Covid...so the family all know what a smaller venue should sound like and what instruments should sound like from a room acoustics perspective.
* Sheffield gave me several albums (Discovered Again! and James Newton Howard and Friends were a few of these given to me) and a few of the first released CDs (which just came out during that time). Since college, I continued collecting the Sheffield library of albums and CDs.
I guess this is more nostalgic perspective, but IMHO, when I sit at the piano listening to Sheffield produced works, this music reveals much better reproduced notes, chords, expressiveness, decay, etc. to my ears and my system, relative to other higher end recordings that I have collected. Sadly, these songs make me realize just how bad a player I am. Thankfully my day job does not rely upon my poor music chops.
