How can you evaluate a system with highly processed music?


Each to their own.

But can you really evaluate a system by listening to highly processed, electric/electronic music? How do you know what that sounds like?

I like to listen to voices and acoustic music that is little processed. 

Instruments like piano, violin, etc. 

And the human voice. And the joy of hearing back up singers clearly, etc.

Even if full instrumentation backing a natural sounding voice.

(eg.: singer/songwriters like Lyle Lovett or Leonard Cohen)

There is a standard and a point of reference that can be gauged.

 

mglik

I've probably already mentioned this elsewhere, but a violin/fiddle sounds distinctly different when it's under your ear...in other words, you are playing it yourself...than it does when somebody else is playing it, even a couple feet away.

Defining what you mean by "highly processed" would be helpful when asking this question. Do you consider Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody to be highly processed? How about every Steely Dan or Rush album? One could make the argument that anything recorded on master tapes is highly processed. But let me stop with the rhetorical questions. I can listen to a Brian Eno or Richard H. Kirk or Dead Can Dance or Kraftwerk album and find as much nuance and musicality being revealed than if I listen to Abraxas

I can listen to contemporary and earlier electronic and ambient music and can find that the layered complexity can challenge the limitations of systems and also tell you if the system is revealing everything in the recording.  That has to do as much with one's ability to hear vs. listening. 

I find my system reveals more when everyone is asleep and the house is dead quiet and I'm listening on headphones vs. when the house is "alive" and I'm listening w/ my monitor speakers. 

I think the proper question would be how can you evaluate a system with a crappy recording and environmental noise influencing the listening experience. 

If you are looking to evaluate a system you can do it quicker with test tones.  Dynamics, room interactions, frequency response/balance, stereo imagining and depth reproduction can be determined without listening to actual music.  Of course, follow up with a few music selections to confirm your initial findings.  The music can be anything you know well.

 

Taking a step back, how can we know the level of processing applied to music?   I often wonder when listening to a passage or song the amount of post processing and the source of the sound:  Voice, manipulated voice, computer, synth, instrument . . . 

@onhwy61

If you are looking to evaluate a system you can do it quicker with test tones.

 

That sounds incredibly nerdy but it might just be the most practical way of testing.

A guaranteed point of reference.

Are there any recommended test discs/recordings?

 

@12many

I think more or less everything electronically recorded is highly processed, some of it ludicrously so.

Straight recordings seemed to be abandoned as soon as recording on tape was adopted in the 1950s.

Every single voice on TV and Radio is manipulated electronically. I remember the huge banks of compressors they used in the radio station where I used to volunteer some 25 years ago.

Not a single person there cared whether their voice sounded life-like, they all wanted it to sound ’better’.

Compression has been routinely used in recording since it's birth, and moving to the digital domain has only allowed it to be used to even greater levels.