[rish_077]

Hi

I am new to AudioCircle and I always take my Eric Clapton's Chronicle CD with me for the track 5 Layla. Somehow, I love the soundstage on it, and I feel it helps me understanding the definition of imaging from the speakers I am auditioning for.
How about you? Do you have a favorite song/track that you take for auditioning?

[richidoo]

Overall Musicality: Clifford Brown "I Don't Stand A Ghost of a Chance With You." B-52s "Topaz." Basie at Birdland "Segue in C." Devo "Whip It"
Tonal accuracy: Prokofiev, Lt Kije Suite, 3rd mvmt, Antal Dorati/Netherlands Radio.
Bass/room: Marc Johnson - Overpass
Mids/harmonics: Julia Fisher-Bach Sonatas, solo piano: Ingrid Fliter/Yulianna Avdeeva/Jam Lisiecki/etc
Treble: accordion, Dizzy Gillespie w/harmon mute
HiFiNess: Tom Tom Club "Genius of Love", Peter Gabriel "Growing Up"

[MttBsh]

A track I heard this summer at the Pacific NW Audio fest that really impressed me was "The Man In The Long Black Coat" performed by Bob Dylan (it was apparently written by Willy Nelson). Anyway, it features some amazing echo guitar, harmonica and deep, deep bass. Playing it at home on QOBUZ sounds almost as good as it did on the system in that mega$$ showroom.

[twitch54]

Chuck Mangione - 'Children of Sanchez'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28ds69kqY8s

[rollo]

Overall Musicality: Clifford Brown "I Don't Stand A Ghost of a Chance With You." B-52s "Topaz." Basie at Birdland "Segue in C." Devo "Whip It"
Tonal accuracy: Prokofiev, Lt Kije Suite, 3rd mvmt, Antal Dorati/Netherlands Radio.
Bass/room: Marc Johnson - Overpass
Mids/harmonics: Julia Fisher-Bach Sonatas, solo piano: Ingrid Fliter/Yulianna Avdeeva/Jam Lisiecki/etc
Treble: accordion, Dizzy Gillespie w/harmon mute
HiFiNess: Tom Tom Club "Genius of Love", Peter Gabriel "Growing Up"

  Excellent choices.

charles

[mix4fix]

I was told long ago to use music you are intimately familiar with. You listen to it so much that you picked up hidden sounds and vocals. That is the music you enjoy on a regular basis.

I am going to call out audio fest vendors:
If a vendor doesn't want to play your music, they are either hiding the fact that their system can't handle all forms of music or they don't deserve your business, You are the possible future customer. This is the music you listen to whether they like it or not. I believe that some vendors are so stuck up that they don't realize that we listen to all kinds of music. Just look at the threads on the Music Circle. A whole thread dedicated to heavy metal. We may not listen to every Norwegian black/death metal that's listed, but we do share the love of metal. Sames goes for any other genres of music that we share common interest in. Life isn't just audiophile-approved music. It's going to Wa-Wa and hearing Grimes, it's gong into Forever 21 and hearing B52s, etc.

[nlitworld]

There's a couple I go to for hearing different things.

For hearing soundstage and recreating atmospheric acoustics is definitely Alice In Chains - MTV Unplugged album. Hearing the audience, the room reverberating, the Metallica guys in the front row pitching shit, etc. Just a fantastic album to recreate the scene.

For hearing tone with texture I like Nightmares On Wax - In A Space Outta Sound album, specifically the songs Pudpots and African Pirates. I also really like Thundercat - Drunk album, specifically the song Uh Uh. Holy schnikey that dude can play bass, but it will be a clear test of bass speed if your system can keep up, especially without losing the piano tone behind it.

For overall balance and torture testing if a system sounds congested, The Mars Volta - Amputecture album, specifically the song Day Of The Baphomets. So much going on and it sounds incredible when a system is articulate enough to resolve. I usually offset a balance of this song vs some others in a detail vs natural tone tradeoff.

For me, I want everything to seem natural, plausible, but palpable. I'm especially picky when it comes to drums as I grew up attending tons of live shows with my cousin playing drums and getting to sit in on listening to that. For me, each cymbal should sound distinct, each strike should be independent and placement discernible. A hi-hat should sound dofferent than a splash, a crash, a trash, a china and especially a ride. A cymbal strike on the bell should sound completely different than on the meat of the cymbal. Also the placement of each cymbal strike in the soundstage should be different. Hi-hat and snare belongs on the drummer's left, ride on drummer's right If the drummer is going to be set back further in the soundstage as a typical concert performance. If it's a jazz studio where everyone is sitting in a round robin arrangement, that's be fine to have drummer mic'd from behind, but then you can't still set the drums further back in the arrangement. To me, those are big and easy things to pick out in "soundstage accuracy" but be careful as it'll start to drive you nuts when things are out of place.

Obviously there's all the typical Steely Dan or Dire Straights audiophile tracks, but while those songs are good, they are overplayed to the nth degree and boring.

As I think of more I really like to listen when changing up my system, I'll post up here. Not enough coffee yet this morning to go through my list.

[FullRangeMan]

There is other topic from 1 or 2 years ago about this same subject.

Listening new speakers with well recorded music doesn't make much sense IMO, the speaker will tend to sound good, then you buy this thing and in your room the sound is bad because your recordings are as bad as the real life, the good recordings are few.

[toocool4]

For me, I just use whatever music I am enjoying at that moment in time. 

[Letitroll98]

My ex was a high frequency nut, like a bass head in reverse.  So whenever I got something new, components, speakers, cables, I pulled out the Shawn Colvin cd Cover Girl and queued up her cover of Talking Heads "This Must Be the Place" for her to tell me how it sounded.  She's deaf in one ear and has hearing loss in the other and is the most discerning judge of audio quality I've ever encountered.  I can only guess, but I think it's because she's spent a lifetime listening for tiny clues in sound to be able to follow conversations and hear the TV, etc.  Regardless, she can instantly identify frequency aberrations in audio systems that I have to listen for hours to pick up.

[simoon]

When I am evaluating gear, especially speakers, my first choice is always something I know is as accurate as possible with regards to natural: timbre, dynamics, detail, attach/delay, soundstage and imaging. I want to get a known 'baseline', as it were.

This for me, will always be recordings made, where all the musicians were  playing at the same time, in the same acoustic space, where the recording engineer took efforts to capture as much of the natural spatial cues of the acoustic space, and where a minimum was done to the recording after it was recorded.

I am referring to classical recordings (and many acoustic jazz recordings), where the main goal is to capture the event as close to how it sounded at the time it was recorded. This is done using mic configurations such as: Blumlein, Decca tree, ORTF, XY, etc.

Almost everyone knows what a violin, cello, piano, flute, etc sound like in real life, so the reproduction we are hearing from the speakers, has a well known, natural referent we can compare to. But with most mainstream studio recordings (some of those already mentioned, and may highly touted ones: Aja, Dire Straights, Eagles, etc), we have no possible way of knowing if what we are hearing actually sounds like it did when it was recorded. So much was done after the fact (overdubs, added delay, panning, flanging, chorus, etc), that any semblance of how the original instrument sounded, has been buried behind those effects. 

How are we supposed to know what Clapton's, Omar Rodríguez-López', guitars actually sounded like when they were recorded? Or Chris Franz' drums, or Tina's bass? And any thing resembling a soundstage and image on a rock studio recording, has all been done using studio effects (panning, delay, etc). When you hear one musician appear to be to the left of another, or further back, that is because that is where the engineer panned them to be, not because they were actually in that position.

When you listen to a classical recording, and you hear a violinist appear to the left of the cellist, that is because that is where they were when the recording was done, not because the engineer artificially place them there using panning. When you hear percussion appearing to come from behind the rest of the orchestra, that is because they were located in the back of the orchestra when the recording was done.





Once I am satisfied with the naturalness of: timbre, dynamics, soundstage, imaging, etc, then I can listen to other types of recordings, knowing that I have a good baseline to refer to.

Even before I was a fan of classical music, I would still evaluate gear this way. I understood the value of of good, natural sounding recordings.

[FullRangeMan]

Violin1 looks great

[rollo]

  Live Acoustic Piano. String Quartet. For me Tonality and Harmonic structure is key. No dryness, bright or hard sound.


charles