Most Challenging CD

"Ein Straussfest" on Telarc has the most challenging dynamics I can think of in my collection.

Extreme dynamics and transients are the thing that will do in most recording and playback systems the easiest, I believe.

These characterize the recorded gunshots and explosives in that recording.

I think several early Telarc recordings have these kinds of extreme dynamics which was a novelty aspect of some the early CD recordings offered, especially on Telarc.

I think as time went on, record producers realized that these extreme dynamics and transients were too much for most peoples playback gear to handle and tended to sound distorted and bad in most cases, including quiet passages that could not be heard by most, especially in cars, so they backed off a bit from attempting to capture these extreme dynamics in most recordings as things progressed and the novelty wore off.

Also, many people's record players could not track the heavily modulated grooves in the vinyl versions of a lot of the early commercial telarc digitally recorded records taht came out in teh very late 1970's, so that did not work well for the masses either other than as a novelty.

"the softest sheen on a voice"

This is somewhat about transient response as well.

Transients are present in many flavors and to various degrees at many frequencies throughout all recordings, to some extent.

A lot of modern high end systems do a decent job handling transients, although some better than others.

I 've found a lot of teh classic 7 Moody Blues remaster albums to be perhaps the most challenging in this regard for me. Perhaps because these recordings have a lot of murky, low frequency dynamics occurring that are very challenging for a system to resolve fully. When it does though, as is possible with some of teh newer CD remasters more so than the originals, a lot of transient detail and sharpness emerges on the recordings overall though that is otherwise usually obscured.

Part of this for me is that I love these recordings in particular so getting the most out of them has been an ongoing challenge that really matters for me over the years since I first started picking them up on vinyl over 35 years ago.

I suppose getting the most possible out of most any decent recording one really cares about is perhaps always the most challenging case in practice that matters for most audiophiles in that here is where we tend to seek the highest standards that matter to us most.

How about the tune "Oh Yeah" by Yello? I forget the CD name.

Lurch from the Adams Family doing his best Macho Man Randy Savage imitation.

Death magnetic by metallica

If you can crank this cd, and enjoy it much less even survive for 10
minutes or more, your rig is in very good shape.