What is the One Test Track That Tells You Almost Everything About A System?
My recent thread comparing Tidal and Qobuz generated a lot of great discussion so I thought I’d try another question for the group.
If you had to choose one track that tells you almost everything about a system, what would it be?
I’m talking about the track you play when:
• evaluating a new component
• setting up a system
• showing someone what your system can do
Ideally it reveals several things at once — imaging, tonal balance, bass control, dynamics, etc.
One of mine is Patricia Barber – “Nardis” from Cafe Blue.
The recording exposes bass articulation, room ambience, and micro-dynamics almost immediately.
I’m always looking for new reference tracks, so I’d love to hear what others use — and what specifically the track reveals about a system.
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.
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Yarlung Records circling tones. If you can hear the tones above and behind your head, your speaker placement and room acoustics are in total synch. |
