Road trip to demo $10,000 speakers

skyscraper,

I will echo others. Bring with you what you will be listening to once you take speakers home. If it is Sheffield drums, so be it. Otherwise, you seem to have quite a large collection so pick your favorites and just go with them. Who cares if speakers can pull all the obscure Japanese percussionists just right when you really like Hotel California and Barry Manilow? I will second the opinion about Steely Dan, especially on SACD. They are a nice challenge for the system. I use it to feel good about how it sounds but, I admit, it is not what I ever listen to otherwise. Nothing wrong with the music, just not my favorites.

It is probably anathema to mention Barry Manilow on an audiophile forum and he was just an example, nothing personal I promise. On the other hand, someone has bought all those records he put out.

so.......the list is ten listening days long...IF you want to get past obvious listener fatigue and louder is better speakers.....
I spent 7 hours at one dealer weeding out 4 power amps....and one was DOA after 3 minutes.. ARC class D...

IMO split this up or pare the list a bit.....

Proac D48R

Here are a some CDs I’ve found to be good for demos. Maybe you already have a couple, but they’re all good music (at least IMHO) in addition to being very well recorded. Of course they’re only good for demo purposes if you’re already pretty familiar with them before going to audition.

Keb Mo - Slow Down. Good for dynamics, bass, guitar, and male vocals

Patricia Barber - Companion. Live recording, soundstage/imaging, and female vocals

Sera Una Noche (from MA Recordings). incredible soundstaging, percussion, woodwinds

Tony Falanga- Soul of the Bass. Acoustic bass, strings, tone, incredible imaging and soundstage

Joe Sample - Old Places, Old Faces. Piano, sax, imaging

Oscar Peterson meets Roy Hargrove and Ralph Moore. Intimate jazz, piano, trumpet

Tons of others, but hope this gives you some additional fun and useful stuff.

It may seem like a simple, obvious suggestion but: don’t forget to bring a lot of music that you actually listen to. I think it’s tempting for us audiophiles when grabbing music to audition a system to gravitate to the really good recordings/audiophile stuff because we want to see just how good/realistic the system can sound. But are those discs really making up the bulk of your listening?

I learned long ago to bring everything I listen to, from crap to great, to see how the speaker works with the music that I truly love and want to play. The sort of "would I play this in the car" is a sort of marker for the music I want to play just because it’s the music I like, vs sheer sound quality.