Best songs to test speakers

[EdmundGTP]

If you can find a copy, get The Boston Rally Bass Collection. Its a 3 CD set, that was released by Boston Acoustics about 8 years ago. It really has some amazingly well recorded songs and insanely deep bass tracks for system evaluation. Once in a while a copy or two will show up on Amazon.

Other albums that I use for setup/eval.

Diana Krall - Girl in the Other Room

Tord Gustavsen Trio - The Ground

Collective Soul - Self Titled

Jeff Buckley - Grace (previously mentioned but I felt the need to 2nd it)

Dave Matthews Band - Crash (rest of the album, not just the song)

Blues Traveler - Four

the Guitar Music for Small Rooms compilations are good as well.

And if I feel like seriously pushing the volume and finding out the ultimate level of sonic destruction that a speaker/system is capable of, I throw in the album World Coming Down by Type O Negative.

[tenntarheel]

I'm partial to hearing female vox as they can be really colored by systems/speakers midrange.

Bonnie Raitt's "nick of Time is good, Kate Bush, Allison Krause, Emmylou Harris ...

Tool's recordings, especially the song Anemia from that CD has a LOT of complex bass/kick

drum work that can really tax your bottom end for clarity, response, and tone. Listen to it LOUD :-)

Their latest CD 10,000 Days' track "Vicarious" (at the end) taxes the bottom as well.

Peter Gabriel's "So" is just an amazing sounding record- so good that it sounds pretty good on anything,

but if you are familiar with it you can really test details like reverb decay, separation, and dynamics.

Telarc's recordings are also great - I LOVE the series they did with Fred Fennel (and especially

the Holst Suite in E flat with "the bass drum heard round the world"!). Awesome "classical"

recordings with a ton of dynamics.

Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales is an excellent recording as is Lyle Lovette's I Love Everybody.

His voice is just so colorful- with a great recording that details each instrument "behind" his vocal.

of course re-mastered Aja and Donald Fagen's "The Nightfly" are astounding and a great way to judge

depth and separation

King's X's "dogman" has about as much very bottom end as I have ever heard on a pop recording.

I don't know how they got that much low frequency compressed & on there. It will push your sub for sure.

Somebody already mentioned the Stereophile discs - they are superb.

[tenntarheel]

ooohh... Type O rocks.

 If you can find a copy, get The Boston Rally Bass Collection.  Its a 3 CD set, that was released by Boston Acoustics about 8 years ago.  It really has some amazingly well recorded songs and insanely deep bass tracks for system evaluation.  Once in a while a copy or two will show up on Amazon.

Other albums that I use for setup/eval.

Diana Krall - Girl in the Other Room

Tord Gustavsen Trio - The Ground 

Collective Soul - Self Titled

 Jeff Buckley - Grace (previously mentioned but I felt the need to 2nd it)

Dave Matthews Band - Crash (rest of the album, not just the song)

Blues Traveler - Four 

the Guitar Music for Small Rooms compilations are good as well.

And if I feel like seriously pushing the volume and finding out the ultimate level of sonic destruction that a speaker/system is capable of, I throw in the album World Coming Down by Type O Negative. 

 

 

[mfk]

Personally, and this is my opinion and invalid for all but me, but I think the best music to test speakers is the stuff you listen to all the time. In my case, I use the Dropkick Murphy's "Shipping off to Boston" or AC/DC, hells bells or something of that nature, and then I listen to the sound coming from one of the first three Star Wars movies. The sound of the craft alone is beautiful, for me the ability to hear the shape of something is what separates Klipsch stuff apart from the rest.

[Arash]

Leonard Cohen:Everybody Know

fantastic

[brogh]

Hi

- Roger Waters 92's Amused to death

Incredible album really well recorded and with high dynamic impact, it also has Q-sound system in it which will make some sounds circle around your head

if you are searching tunes with super bass i would also take in consideration :

Nelly furtado - let my hair down

Madonna - hung up

Britney - piece of me ( which also has a nice voice doubling effect on the chorus )

Give a try to it !

Cheers

[T.H.E. Droid]

I use a variety of test disks.

Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" has it all-- very wide range of frequencies, wide dynamic range, a variety of instruments, solo and choral human voices, and some good percussion. I have two versions--- RCA Red Seal, Ozawa conducting Boston Symphony. This version has an interesting defect that is interesting-- some very low, almost subsonic bass noise that makes evaluating the lower end more interesting. The other version is Duetsche Grammaphone, James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony. As with typical Duetsche Grammaphone recordings, it is more clinical in the sound and has less extreme low bass, but is a very clean recording. It makes a good comparison counterpoint to the Ozawa version.

A wonderful recording to illustrate the sonic advantages of horn systems is the soundtrack recording of Emelie' by Jan Tiersen. This recording has many layers of interesting acoustic intstruments and many of the more subtle details simply can't be heard with non-horn systems. Even my wife can tell the difference.

Fourplay is great for jazz because they make very clean recordings and have a good mix of electric and acoustic sounds. "Best of Fourplay" is a good choice if you haven't heard them.

I'm a longtime fan of Enigma. Their music tends to be quite processed and layered. "Platinum" is a good choice because the three-disc album has a greatest hits CD, one of remixes, and a third disc or unreleased tracks.

[ZEUS121996]

Steely Dan's Aja

Little Feat Waiting for Columbus

Santana's Marathon or Zebop

I'm surprised no one has mentioned any of War's music for bass

Edited March 24, 2016 by ZEUS121996

[Pikesanders]

My favorites are:

On every street. - Dire Straits

Dam right! I got the blues - Buddy Guy

Amused to death - Roger Waters

The look for love - Diana Krall

Dream of the blue turtles - Sting

Only the lonely - Frank Sinatra

90125 - Yes

So - Peter Gabriel

Push the button - the chemical brothers

Symphony No 7 - Beethoven

Besides being great albums they are very well recorded and can give you the chance to listen great voices, bass, guitars, drums and strings.

[Ironsave]

I always use "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac.

This is great for percussion as well as getting speakers set up properly (soundstage and imaging).

If I am auditioning speakers, I will use several tracks including:

1. "Alive" by Pearl Jam

2. "Raining Blood" by Slayer (Cen the speakers play this complex and fast music while staying clear, articulate and accurate at high volume????)

3. "St. Anger" by Metallica (This song sounds like crap on most speakers; the percussion is tinny and has much echoing so it is intentional; a good benchmark IMHO).

4. A few select Eminem tracks to evaluate the bass

5. "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac as mentioned above. (Great to see if the speakers image well).

[usmcavenger]

If your into Rock. I'd suggest just about any Avenged Sevenfold song. They're just soo much detail and thought that goes into their music. Its not just the same riff from start to finish like a rap song and the guitar solos are some of the best rock bands crank out these days. Any pretty much any Metallica album for that matter. Their S&M album that they did with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra is amazing witha decent surround set up!

[usmcavenger]

If you want to test bass. A couple of my favorites are "A Milli" by lil Wayne and "Music Box" by Eminem although theres soo much more. Drake's music is also awesome to listen to. A lot of it's deep and mellow. Infact I just threw on my Beats headphones so I can hear some of this now that I'm thinking about it! (wife's asleep so I have to resort to these till morning) haha.

[Invidiosulus]

Flight of the Cosmic Hippo by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

Silver Rain by Marcus Miller

[garyrc]

There is a school of thought (J. Gordon Holt?) which says that you should NOT listen to recordings that you know intimately when reviewing a new component, since you have already formed opinions about how the music should sound. That you should listen to new recordings instead so that you can judge their merits afresh. I do both. I have to say that there is some merit in both approaches.

I agree completely. Do both! Do the unfamiliar recordings first, then, later on, see if the system does justice to the music you love and know. Beware: a more revealing speaker may expose disortion in a familiar source that you didn't know was there. On the other hand, maybe the speaker is distorting. Finding out which is not easy. If you hear "new" disortion coming from in a familiar recording, seek other recordings of sinilar orchestrations, with the same instruments featured, etc., and see what happens.

Are you buying?

Before shopping for speakers, go to several live performances to, as PWK said, "recalibrate your ears."

It is amazing how many people don't know what Classical and Jazz sound like live. And they both can sound many different ways.

Unless someone sets up a live v.s. recorded demo, we're stuck with "Fidelity to the imagined original."

If you can't find the speakers you want to hear in stores (all but certain) seek out friends or forum members who live within travel distance, and listen to their speakers.

Movie theaters (with new movies) sometimes are good examples of "horny" sound (Klipsch, JBL, Altec, etc.) in the most general ways.

[Chris A]

Resurrecting this very old thread, once again...

 

 

[Edit (28 May 2016): I've learned a lot since beginning the "Missing Octave" unmastering effort in January 2015, some of which is echoed below.]

 

I do have an observation: some or many of the disks recommended in this thread include those that I find to be mixed too hotly and have too much sibilance--making them sound artificial. Others -- well I just disagree - they really aren't that good, and lack depth, clarity, soundstage, and presence.

[I've learned that many recordings can be resurrected from poor mastering--to an extent, but that as their as-released mastering can be quite awful to the resulting sound of the tracks.]

 

I look for test disks that sound "real" in room. I have my list, too:

 

1) Several record labels, such as Linn and Reference Recordings, uniformly put out great recordings, albeit tending toward non-pop, non-rock titles. I find that pure acoustic recordings are very good for judging speaker quality. Handel's Messiah (Dublin Edition) by Linn is outstanding, and puts you in a good mood at the same time. Organ, piano, and female voice recordings are extremely revealing of speakers limitations in the upper midrange/tweeter range.

 

2) Percussion-heavy disks such as Sheffield Labs 'James Newton Howard and Friends and any recording with a great deal of cymbals or other high frequency instruments are good bets. I find that the more recently the disks are recorded, the better they have captured these difficult-to-reproduce percussion transients.

 

3) Real audiophile test disks such as the notable Chesky Records disks are absolutely typically outstanding in recording quality and in their ability to surface speaker issues. (I'm not so big on the older Stereophile test disks, which have their own issues, but do have very useful test tones and pink noise tracks.)

 

4) Your favorite artist's disks are good to get a proper understanding of commercial but nevertheless well-recorded music. They will give you an idea of how your older recordings will sound.

 

5) Solo violin disks, such as It Ain't Necessarily So by Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg, are excellent at identifying muddiness and crossover phasing/balance issues. Violins have the most overtones of any musical instrument - and sound wrong when anything is wrong.

 

6) Solo saxophone (jazz), such as Dexter Gordon's Go! or John Coltrane, are indispensable at hearing any edginess and other speaker balancing issues.

 

7) I find that combinations of instruments, such as piano and organ, clarinet and piano, violin and piano, and full string orchestras, are notoriously difficult for speakers to reproduce realistically. For strings, listen for "steely orchestras". [Steely-sounding string orchestras are due to significant mastering-introduced attenuation below 500 Hz with corresponding boost of frequencies in the 1-5 kHz band.]

 

Chris

[willland]

For fast, punchy bass, Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover".

The intro is crazy. It really thumps with incredible midbass with kick drums in perfect time.

Bill

[derrickdj1]

One of the deepest bass jazz songs: by Praful-sigh, on One Day Deep. Jazz Fusion

Jazz Master V: Paul Hardcastle, excellent bass and other unique sounds. Smooth Jazz

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[BMWM5]

Rock - Doobie Brothers " Listen to the Music"

Female

Vocal- Whitney Houston "I Will Always Love You"

Instrumental- Telarc Recording "Star Tracks" Theme from Indiana Jones

Classical - A) Telarc Recording Richard Stauss Also Sprach Zarathustra (Theme from 2001 Space Odessey)

Telarc Recording Stravinsky's Firebird Suite

C) Telarc Recording Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man

[Chris A]

Here's a new one from Hiromi (Voice) that will test your subs, woofers, midranges, tweeters, crossovers, amplifiers, preamp, DAC, and electric power grid. Recommend to play it at about 90+ dBC at your listening spot since it really comes alive at that level.

 

Jazz - but not your typical jazz...um, probably a better description is "somewhat aggressive improv on pop and funk themes".

[EDIT (28 May 2016): I've found that significant unmastering EQ was necessary to return this recording to its natural sound for a grand piano, most notably significant boost in EQ below 500 Hz down to 70 Hz.]

 

Chris

[djk]

Reminds me of Flim and the BBs.