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

@ted_b     Great call on Enamoured. I thought I was the only one. The whole album is uniformly well recorded and audiophile quality. I even called up the head man at Neurodisc to compliment him on the recording quality of the disc.

@ulcerdoc 

It has been a while since I played my 2011 Premonition pressing of Cafe Blue....thanks for the bump, I forgot what a wild 9 min ride Nardis is.  

greetings & kind regards

if Stravinsky "Petrushka" and "The Firebird" do not sound good on my system i am not happy . unfortunately they do not contain vocals , there is always Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas to name but a few . 

cheers

When i first got the hifi bug aged 16, and for the first decade or so, including when i was in the trade i had specialist ’find out’ tracks, foremost was Another Brick in the Wall pt1, that moody sound followed by the helicopter, if it landed on the roof of the listening space then all was good. These days however I’ll play whatever i am listening to most at the time, because that’s what matters to me, not some ancient yardstick.

That being said, when I’m deep in the zone my ultimate album is Oto by Fluke. For sound quality nothing comes close to the subterranean bass, the stupendous soundstage and irresistible flow contained in this album. The only other record i could mention in the same breath is the William Orbit masterpiece Ray of Light by Madonna.  Seriously i kid  you not the production on that album is superlative. 

I have no one ultimate choice; it’s always in a state of flux, but if I had to choose two recordings, both of which I have owned for decades and recently been playing, it would be Leinsdorf, conducting the LA Symphony in Prokofiev’s Excerpts from the Ballet, Romeo and Juliet, particularly side two.  To those not familiar with the music, as I recently played for a couple that lives in the building, scared the crap  out of them.  The dynamics, from a whisper to an all out orchestral assault is simply stunning.  I have unopened copies of this never-to-be-repressed recording.  The other recording,  from a soundtrack from the film, "The Diva", Wilhelmina Fernandez sings the aria from Catalani’s opera, La Wally, just makes me emotional.  Wilhelmina sings as beautifully, if not as stunningly, as she looks.  A great system amplifies this.  I have Maria Callas singing this aria, but I don’t know if it’s the age of the recording, or the recording quality, just doesn’t do it for me like Fernandez.