Finding an album with many good tracks is tough...finding the odd well recorded song is much easier. Here are a few suggestions for albums where everything is outsanding;
"Homage to Duke" engineered by Dave Grusin (also plays piano) - this recording has everything, including a tremendous dynamic range. It is an excellent test CD due to the variety of individual instruments that are clearly audible. This is the one rare album in which every track is well recorded and engineered.
Another exceptionally well engineered album is "Swing while your Winning" by Robbie Williams.
The only pop/rock genre album that I can think of is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits (all of these are well recorded/produced and therefore makes a good test CD).
Classical is, of course, much much easier...plenty of good stuff out there from Telarc - so many I would not know where to begin, although The Very Best of Erich Kunzel: Top 20 is a good starting point as it has some good dynamic range - especially the Batman Theme, a crescendo that will easily exceed the capabilities of many consumer systems at high SPL but a great way to detect at exactly what SPL level the system starts distorting badly.
Telarc Catalog #: 80259 Rachmaninov Piano Concertos 2 and 3
Performer: Horacio Gutierrez => this is excellent because of the piano....a piano is by far the most reliable test....a piano is tough for many systems to reproduce properly (suprisingly pianos have huge dynamic range including sharp transients) or perhaps our ears are very good at recognizing accuracy in a piano.
A final test which will fail on more than 95% of audiophile systems is Yim Hok Man Chinese Drums and the track "Poems of Thunder"...if you jack this up to realistic drum live music levels then most two way speaker systems will be heavily distorting. All the drum music on this album is well recorded (uncompressed drum sounds are so very rare), however, no matter how exciting this is, it can get boring after a while - so it is not a good general test CD.
The above suggestions have plenty of real instruments (even Tom Petty) - so they are a good test... piano is the most reliable test..I tend to stay well away from electronica (Black Eyed Peas etc) for system testing as it is simply too hard to tell what sound is actually right - as there is no real reference for electronically generated stuff!
"Homage to Duke" engineered by Dave Grusin (also plays piano) - this recording has everything, including a tremendous dynamic range. It is an excellent test CD due to the variety of individual instruments that are clearly audible. This is the one rare album in which every track is well recorded and engineered.
Another exceptionally well engineered album is "Swing while your Winning" by Robbie Williams.
The only pop/rock genre album that I can think of is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits (all of these are well recorded/produced and therefore makes a good test CD).
Classical is, of course, much much easier...plenty of good stuff out there from Telarc - so many I would not know where to begin, although The Very Best of Erich Kunzel: Top 20 is a good starting point as it has some good dynamic range - especially the Batman Theme, a crescendo that will easily exceed the capabilities of many consumer systems at high SPL but a great way to detect at exactly what SPL level the system starts distorting badly.
Telarc Catalog #: 80259 Rachmaninov Piano Concertos 2 and 3
Performer: Horacio Gutierrez => this is excellent because of the piano....a piano is by far the most reliable test....a piano is tough for many systems to reproduce properly (suprisingly pianos have huge dynamic range including sharp transients) or perhaps our ears are very good at recognizing accuracy in a piano.
A final test which will fail on more than 95% of audiophile systems is Yim Hok Man Chinese Drums and the track "Poems of Thunder"...if you jack this up to realistic drum live music levels then most two way speaker systems will be heavily distorting. All the drum music on this album is well recorded (uncompressed drum sounds are so very rare), however, no matter how exciting this is, it can get boring after a while - so it is not a good general test CD.
The above suggestions have plenty of real instruments (even Tom Petty) - so they are a good test... piano is the most reliable test..I tend to stay well away from electronica (Black Eyed Peas etc) for system testing as it is simply too hard to tell what sound is actually right - as there is no real reference for electronically generated stuff!