What is the One Test Track That Tells You Almost Everything About A System?

 

What is the One Test Track That Tells You Almost Everything About A System?

There’s no such thing, of course.

But that doesn’t diminish the fact that which test tracks you bring to an audition are crucial to the productivity and success of said audition. Put another way, if you show up empty-handed and let shop staff spin tracks for you, you’re doomed.

Forget audiophile music: it sounds good on everything. Diana Krall sounds good on tailgate speakers. Dealers love audiophile music because it helps sell gear.

Do bring tracks that reflect the extremes of your listening tastes and habits, because ultimately you want a system to possess the range and ability to play both (and everything in between) to your delight.

Maybe I would play a Bert Kaempfert track at 65 dB and a Uniform and The Body track at 110 dB. A system that excels at both is more likely than not to excel at playing all the music I’m likely to ever throw at it.

@ulcerdoc I usually start with female vocals that combine bass, instrumentation, dynamics, highs, and soundstage in the first 30 seconds or so.  Then I move onto tracks that are more focused on bass.  Then I tend to go to tracks that highlight dynamics and transients.  And finally I focus on things that have an interesting soundstage.  My main playlist is an embarrassing 147 tracks long but I know most of them very well and jump around depending on what I am listening for.  I buy a lot of gear and A/B test all of it to figure out what to keep so that main playlist gets a lot of use. The playlist I am sharing here is a much more manageable subset of my main list.  . 

https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/34903485

Mashif

Thanks for sharing that — great explanation of why you use it. I hadn’t thought about the sparse sections and those faint percussion cues as a system discriminator, but that makes a lot of sense. I’m going to give “Shadow People” a spin on my system and see what it reveals. And I agree… it’s a terrific song in its own right, which is half the fun of these kinds of tests.

It's quite strange to me that classical music has fallen so far out of favor with audiophiles as music to evaluate a system, or a new piece of gear. 

For me, classical music is overall the best for evaluating a system. 

Classical music is recorded: with all the musicians playing at the same time, in the same acoustic space, where the recording engineer  endeavors to capture an accurate representation of that event. Including: the acoustic space itself, the musicians position within it, their position with relation to each other, the ambience, etc.

When a musician seems like they are to the right or the left of another musician, or further back in the soundstage, it is because that is where they were when the recording was mad. Not because the studio engineer took their individual mono track, then panned them to that location. 

It is a soundstage and imaging that has a referent to an actual event, not fabricated in a studio. It is a qualitative difference. 

Also, since the instruments are recorded with a minimum (or no) of effects done  (digital or analog delay, reverb, echo, phasing, quantization, etc, etc), the sound of the instruments are going to be much closer to how they sounded when the recording was made. 

@ulcerdoc 

I have many songs as well. Give When the Lights Go Down by Prince a try. Great thread! I’m going thru and writing down songs to play.