Favorite Test Tracks for Audiophiles

[Fido]

Dire Straights Money for Nothing is mind blowing and Steve Miller Band

[Zen Traveler]

 

 

I like to use Alice Cooper's "welcome to my nightmare" album. It has some decent bass and some horn instruments which broadcast very well with my belles.

I realize this is a 2 channel thread but if you like this album, my guess is you would really like the DVD-A of Welcome to my Nightmare, and I like slightly better, Billion Dollar Babies. Both multichannel versions sound crisp and the low end on I love the dead, really thumps on our HT below.

I do have that dvd-a and it's awesome. I love how you can distinctly hear the individual kids voices in the surround speakers during "department of youth". I need to check out billion dollar babies

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I'd be curious which you liked better the 2 channel mix or the multichannel?

 

Fwiw, I put the disk in last night and enjoyed it and then put in Everything Must Go on DVD-A. That lead me to put in the Morph the Cat DVD-A so I guess if the OP wants to listen to some really clean material to show off his system anything by Steely Dan would be appropriate.

Edited June 26, 2016 by Zen Traveler

[Zen Traveler]

Dire Straights Money for Nothing is mind blowing and Steve Miller Band

 I definitely don't want to thread-jack but I have both of those on multichannel music disks (SACD and DTS) and they sound phenomenal!

[dtr20]

I like to use Alice Cooper's "welcome to my nightmare" album. It has some decent bass and some horn instruments which broadcast very well with my belles.

I realize this is a 2 channel thread but if you like this album, my guess is you would really like the DVD-A of Welcome to my Nightmare, and I like slightly better, Billion Dollar Babies. Both multichannel versions sound crisp and the low end on I love the dead, really thumps on our HT below.

I do have that dvd-a and it's awesome. I love how you can distinctly hear the individual kids voices in the surround speakers during "department of youth". I need to check out billion dollar babies

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

I'd be curious which you liked better the 2 channel mix or the multichannel?

I can't pick a favorite. I put in the dvd-a in my home theater to show off that, and I play the CD to show off my 2-channel setup (belles).

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[Rjk1972]

Friday Night in San Francisco by Al Dimeola and the rest... is a good one I didn't see mentioned yet.

Ella Fitzgerald's Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie, the one mastered by Dennis Drake, on CD is great.

[eq_shadimar]

Here are some of the ones I use:

 

Mickey Hart - CD - Dafos - This will test everything!

Beethoven's 6th symphony - CD - various recordings

Chemical Brothers - CD - Exit Planet Dust

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - SACD

Led Zeppelin II - vinyl - Japanese Pressing

GRP Jazz Sampler Volume 1 - CD - Mountain Dance and In the mood are my favorites

Diana Krall - CD - Wallflower (or anything really)

Grateful Dead - various

[2Bmusic]

This will tax any system except for the might Khorn.   Bella Flecks  Cosmic Hippo!

[mark1101]

 

You have to make sure it plays lousy recordings acceptably.  Probably the most important thing it will ever have to do.  

This is a tall order. Like many have said "the better, more accurate my system gets the worse bad or even mediocre recordings sound". Or something to that effect.

 

Fair enough.  I know what you mean.  It brings up a good point............what is the goal of the system?  If the goal is to have the system sound fabulous on stellar recordings then building a very high resolution system might be what you want.  You can go too far though and it is possible for mediocre or poorer recorded music to sound progressively worse.

 

Most music I enjoy is not recorded the best.  This is music I want to listen to most of the time and it's important that THIS music sounds good to me.  What to do?

 

I would test the system with the music you will listen to most of the time.  Sure it's fun to play something stellar to show off the system and understand what it can do.  We all do that at times.  But I never just play good recordings..........I play what i like to listen to.

 

[Chris A]

You can go too far though and it is possible for mediocre or poorer recorded music to sound progressively worse.

 

I've not experienced this.  In fact, just the opposite.  But I have found that unmastering poorly mastered music increases the pleasure of listening to it by a very great degree, e.g., the Beatles and other 1960s music tracks that were extremely poorly mastered so that you cannot even make out the string instruments playing. 

 

Instead of "fixing" your sound system, why not just fix the music that you listen to every day?  It's a much better solution in my experience.

 

I would test the system with the music you will listen to most of the time.

 

I've always been amazed at how mediocre that badly done recordings can sound on my system, then turn around with a good recording and the sound is so spectacular.  It happens a lot when guests drop in with their favorite music.  I always find that the better the system fidelity, the better the sound...i.e., the notion of "hi-fi".  Anything else seems to me to be "I like it the way that I like it", a mind set that also tends to freeze your music preferences to an instant in time...when there is so much good music in the world yet to hear.

 

Chris

Edited July 3, 2016 by Chris A

[Chris A]

BTW: I recently acquired "American Beauty" and "Live/Dead" CDs on your behalf (the two highest rated Grateful Dead albums as recommended in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die) then unmastered them. 

 

The increase in listening pleasure was a large leap upward, I found, even though I'm not a big fan of this band's music.

 

Chris

[JoeDirt]

Roger waters reissue amused to death on vinyl. The best pink Floyd album that never was. Or pink Floyd's the final cut . the best roger waters solo album that never was.

 LOVE Amused to Death.

Also Radio KAOS and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking - The Intro is fantastic on 5:01 am.

Edited June 28, 2016 by JoeDirt

[Jim]

I have a few. James-Laid (full album or cd), Billy Joel-An Innocent Man (album song), Sade-Promise (full album), Chris Isaak- Wicked Game (song on album or cd, or the whole album as well)

[Gilbert]

Any of several recordings of the ​1812 Overture

or ​Brothers in Arms

SSH

 

 

I'll second these choices.

[Rxonmymind]

Molly Johnson

Summertime

One instrument. A singer. Simple.

Excellent cello bass. Sounds absolutely wonderful on the Belle's. Not sure the complaints about bass. Plenty of NATURAL bass here.

Edited July 3, 2016 by Rxonmymind

[jimmytamp]

I used "The Urban Theme" from Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite album...

[Chris A]

...but am curious what long-time audiophiles like to listen to when testing out a setup they haven't heard before. Please share you top track or a few tracks or an album if you have a personal preference.

 

 

I definitely don't want to thread-jack but I have both of those on multichannel music disks (SACD and DTS) and they sound phenomenal!

 

If I'm auditioning a multi-channel setup, this is the SACD that I use to separate the wheat from the chaff (the SACD I bought in 2009 when it was $14.99 from Amazon):

 

 

I can hear limitations of any 5.1 setup with this one SACD (multichannel and stereo SACD-only...no red book CD layer), and also hear the "micro-detail" that seems so overly emphasized by audiophiles  in each of the surrounding channels, with infrasonic bass and simultaneously sweeping sub-30-Hz waves passing back and forth over the listening position from the actual recording venue.  It's a truly spectacular recording that originated in 1974 using an analog tape recorder of very high quality with very low levels of tape hiss.

 

Caveat emptor: the stereo layer (as well as the vinyl record in stereo) sounds significantly inferior to the multichannel version, so I recommend the multichannel version only.

 

There are no other recordings that I own that can match the sheer scale and complexity of this one.  While the organs sometimes sound a little steely as compared to a true high-res digital recording, the recording can still can reveal details of the setup-under-audition like nothing else I've heard. The musical selections themselves are magnificent to hear in surround sound as you might guess.

 

I've actually only heard this disc done well on one surround sound system...and it took me several years to get it into shape to handle this recording well.

 

Chris

Edited July 3, 2016 by Chris A

[WMcD]

It is well agreed that bombastic recording sound best on very good speakers.

And flaws are revealed in poor recording.

But back in the early days of the Internet I read something interesting.

A K-Horn owner played some 78 rpm recordings (maybe dumped to CD) for a lover of old jazz recordings. The listener said, "It is all worth it."

We read that K-Horns bring out the "inner voices" of recordings. That apparently goes for arguably poor recordings too.

WMcD

[Chris A]

It is well agreed that bombastic recording sound best on very good speakers.

 

If you're referring to the recording that I just identified, there's nothing "bombastic" to it.  It's very difficult to get the setup and room acoustics right to keep it from sounding "bombastic" or otherwise smeared/confused, but once you do it's very much like being there when you shut your eyes. 

 

Recall that the OP wanted to know about recording used when testing a newly heard setup.  That's the one I'd use for multichannel, along with a folio of Beethoven's 9 symphonies on three Blu-Ray discs (including video) of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra under Mariss Janson's baton--which are basically flawless recordings to reproduce when done well.

 

For stereo discs, I'd choose something like James Newton Howard & Friends or Big Notes by Flim & the BB's--like Roy uses (among others) to listen for specific difficult-to-reproduce aspects of reproduction.  Other recordings that I'd bring along would be Crown Imperial, Pomp and Pipes, and Trittico (all from Reference Recordings...Prof Johnson) for overall balance, timbre, and in-room handling of acoustics and loudspeaker coverages. 

 

But I've found that there's a limitation of how well stereo recordings can sound, with any instrumentation/vocals you choose, relative to well-done multichannel recordings.  I can demonstrate this quite easily on my setup.  The best stereo recordings cannot approach the best 5.1 recordings in my experience.

 

Other than those, I'd probably bring along my backup hard drive with all my FLAC-based recordings that I've invested a fair amount of my time unmastering (~7700 tracks to date).  That gives me many options to chase down any issues that might arise during auditioning.  I've found that the most revealing recordings are all from acoustic instrumentation and voices, not amplified.

 

Also refer to post #29 above for an alternate view on the "makes poor recordings sound better" notion.  I've found that nothing makes the tracks "sound better" only "less worse" in my experience...unless the recordings have been poorly mastered using strange EQ curves and still retain line noise: 50-60 Hz and their harmonics.

 

Chris

Edited July 3, 2016 by Chris A

[Fish]

Joe Satriani, (Home) self titled album, all good, try If.

[Bubo]

IMHO any good recording of a girl and a piano.

 

It's easy to tell if the girl sounds like a girl, the same for the piano.

 

The piano puts the amp through the paces going from zero to wide open on a strike.

 

There is also the question of if it moves you.

 

Anything Noemie Wolfs with Hooverphonic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Bs09twUmg&index=6&list=PLgugWBANrQyU39SWyIM6sCIJWo-A3GBlD

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ2Rxnpt_LU

 

 

 

3 LPs Ronstadt cut with Nelson Riddle all masterpieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzNmG_lpNw8

 

Lots of others.

 

Pretty Reckless Taylor Momsen acoustic track can sound great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocl9tU516a8