Amanda McBroom – Growing Up In Hollywood Town (2003, LIM)

Amanda McBroom – Growing Up In Hollywood Town released by Sheffield Lab and has now been reissued as an XRCD24 by Winston Ma. The Sheffield Lab recording Growing up in Hollywood Town with Amanda McBroom on vocals and Lincoln Mayorga on piano is billed as a “large scale pop” recording. It was recorded in the Sheffield Lab Studios at the MGM sound stage in Culver City, California, in 1980, with a small orchestra containing instruments usually associated with classical and jazz.

The most popular songs in Growing up in Hollywood Town are the three songs composed and performed by Amanda McBroom.”Amanda” is beautiful and haunting. “The Portrait” is evocative and sad. And “The Rose,” written for the film of the same name, garnered a Golden Globe Award for Amanda McBroom. She also does a great job with “Dusk.” The other five cuts are primarily instrumental, and include two pieces penned by Lincoln Mayorga.

So if the original Sheffield Lab release was done Direct-to-Disc, what was the source material for the LIM release? Backup analog master tapes were made by Sheffield during the recording sessions. Doug Sax has never before let them out the door of The Mastering Lab until he handed them to Winston in October, 2002, for this project.

JVC’s XRCD24 technology is an extension of its XRCD and XRCD2 technology. It uses the same purist philosophy and the same signal chain, except that the K2 digital processor has been extended to 24 bits. As regular readers know, I have been very impressed with the sound of XRCD and XRCD2 discs. The XRCD24 process should be even better.