What are your test tracks for new audio hardware?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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Hey,

I thought it would be interesting to start a thread to see what all of you listen to to get an idea of how new audio hardware sounds when you get it, or when you are comparing things.

I'll start.


1.) Sting - Desert Rose

I usually start with this track, because it has a lot of varied elements in it. Plain vocals, baselines, synth, strings, world music, etc. I feel like this one song gives me a very large range of things to listen for and judge how I like the sound.



2.) EMB / Futurepop / Covenant.

Next I queue up something more electronic, and dancy. Usually go for EBM to listen to how rapid heavy arpeggiated baselines sound, as many systems just fail on these.

I usually listen through Covenant's "Tour de Force" and then "Call the Ships to Port" as well. Maybe also "The Bomb" by Neuroticfish if I feel I need some more, and maybe even Frog Machine by Infected Mushroom for good measure (technically Psy-trance, but has the same elements I look for, especially fast sounds, to see if they sound muddled or not, and it works, despite the Roland TB-303 abuse and the burp recordings)


4.) Some cheesy pop.

Usually start out with Philip Bailey & Phil Collins - Easy Lover, maybe even Phil Collins "Something Happened on the Way to Heaven"


5.) Something calm, acoustic with vocals

James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" or "You have a Friend" are excellent for this.



6.) Something classical for good measure.

The unaccompanied prelude from Bach's Cello suite No 1 is great for this. Yo-Yo Ma's recording is fantastic.


7.) Depeche Mode Albums

I usually finish off my test by listening through one or more of my favorite albums from start to finish. Depeche Mode's Black Celebration, Violator and/or Songs of Faith and Devotion.

I've added some links to show what the songs are, but the sources are not ideal. Most are spotify, which actually isn't terrible if you have a premium account and set it to high quality streaming. One is YouTube which is awful quality.


So, what are yours?
 
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One of the best albums for SQ is New Gold Dream by Simple Minds so I like to use that. I really like the music too so that helps.

 
rezerekted said:
One of the best albums for SQ is New Gold Dream by Simple Minds so I like to use that. I really like the music too so that helps.

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Excellent choice. Their material is great, but unfortunately they are often reduced to just two songs, "Don't You" and "Alive and Kicking"
 
Yea, and they didn't even write 'Don't You Forget About Me'. I know all their music though and also saw them live sometime around 1982.
 
Some anime soundtracks are pretty fantastic for testing transducer speed, if you are for example, trying to test out the differences of a high end ribbon tweeter versus a traditional dome, or say an electrostatic versus planar headphone.

Ghost in the Shell - Inner Universe




One Punch Man - The Cyborg Fights




Propellerheads - On Her Majety's Secret Service (always pretty good, not from an anime though).

 
I have many, lately I've been using Convergence by Malia, Marlene by Aino Vienna, Déjenme Llorar by Carla Morrison, 20th Anniversary Chesky Records, Nothing else matters live by Metallica, Spring commitment by Vincent Belanger & Anne Bisson etc.

Either high bitrate AAC or lossless.
 
pippenainteasy said:
Some anime soundtracks are pretty fantastic for testing transducer speed, if you are for example, trying to test out the differences of a high end ribbon tweeter versus a traditional dome, or say an electrostatic versus planar headphone.
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I hope you're using the original versions because the youtube compresses the audio heavily.
 
B00nie said:
I hope you're using the original versions because the youtube compresses the audio heavily.
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Youtube links are just for reference. I really hope you dont think somebody would get a Focal Utopia or Stax SR-009 just to listen to free music on youtube--even if someone did theres much better quality streaming available online including lossless quality, haha.
 
pippenainteasy said:
Youtube links are just for reference. I really hope you dont think somebody would get a Focal Utopia or Stax SR-009 just to listen to free music on youtube--even if someone did theres much better quality streaming available online including lossless quality, haha.
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Well, it isn't clear from your post what hardware you are using :p

For my personal needs, I find that Spotify's high desktop setting (320kbps OGG) is more than good enough. I don't personally see the need for FLAC.
 
pippenainteasy said:
Youtube links are just for reference. I really hope you dont think somebody would get a Focal Utopia or Stax SR-009 just to listen to free music on youtube--even if someone did theres much better quality streaming available online including lossless quality, haha.
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Did you mean Focal utopia -line as in speakers or headphones? The utopia speakers are quite nice - I've never liked headphones due to their imaging problems.
 
Just 2 albums since the early 1980s:

1) Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms: The first truly digital album ever to go into wide release, DDD meaning it was digital from the moment the band played the notes all the way till it was pitted on the CDs with no analog at any point in between. I've listened to that entire album hundreds of times over the decades, it was the first CD I ever purchased and I know it as well as the back of my hands, so to speak. Every note, exactly as it should sound, so it's nearly perfect for me in terms of demo material and I can spot a deficiency in an audio system quickly whenever I use that CD for overall quality of the signal output.

2) Erich Kunzel & Cincinnati Pops Orchestra - Time Warp: A rather astonishing disc that I purchased almost on the day it was released so many years ago because I had heard rumors about what it contained and I wasn't (and have never been) disappointed. This was the first digital recording done right of cannons - literal actual cannons being fired during Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. The disc packaging and also the disc itself has a warning label basically pointing out the "digital cannons" and to make sure you keep the volume as low as possible until you can figure out a comfortable level for those incredibly loud peaks the cannons make. I use this one to test for how well a system can handle transient peaks as well as how well it can provide the actual raw power necessary.

Believe me, I've destroyed audio systems with that Time Warp CD, dozens of them. Clipped out amplifiers till their protection circuits trip, blown speaker cones clean out of their voice coils, watched an 18" Cerwin Vega sub with a peak power handling of 4000 watts literally blow itself to shreds when that first cannon fired off, it's pretty hilarious stuff but I haven't really done any of that kind of demo in many years. :)

Suffice to say those two CDs are all I need personally. There's a lot of great discs out there, some stuff from Steely Dan (outstanding audio quality and mastering from the original analog master sessions, those guys really seriously cared about audio quality, absolutely amazing), some older pure digital demo discs (the literal kind that had all sorts of interesting audio effects, one called "The Digital Domain" long ago had a pure digital recording of a 747 landing (and a helicopter too) and it was freakin' LOUD man, really loud and sounded awesome on the right system), and many many others but just those two I mentioned are all I need.
 
B00nie said:
Did you mean Focal utopia -line as in speakers or headphones? The utopia speakers are quite nice - I've never liked headphones due to their imaging problems.
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Nah I dont like the Focal Utopia speaker line I find them somewhat bright. Much prefer Revel or Dynaudio personally. I was talking about the headphone.
 
pippenainteasy said:
Nah I dont like the Focal Utopia speaker line I find them somewhat bright. Much prefer Revel or Dynaudio personally. I was talking about the headphone.
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The older utopias had a bad bump on high frequencies, the III version has a smoother response. It also depends a lot on the room acoustics. I was not blown away by any means by even the III model but I can't call it a bad speaker either.
 
I've been enjoying the experience edition versions of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. The beginning guitar part of the song Wish You Were Here is very clean.

Just got Schiit Modi 2 Uber, Magni 2 Uber, Wyrd, and HE-400i cans. Loving them.
 
Mayo Nakano piano trio playing "Scabulous" is one of the best recordings I've heard in regard to natural feel of space. If you close your eyes you can really feel you're in the live concert. At least if your speakers are good.
 
I used to listen to Boston Acoustics test CD's back in the day when setting up car audio systems. Those and the Sheffield Labs CD's were awesome. Of course someone else broke into my home and decided that all of my installation equipment needed another home at a pawn shop I suppose.

To show how young I am, one of my favorites was Enya's Orinoco Flow. That entire CD was mesmerizing. Here is the crappy quality on Youtube.

The difference in 320 mp3 and FLAC is irritating to me personally. On one hand at high volumes who can really tell? Another aspect is that each person has different hearing capabilities so for one person it matters and to another it doesn't. I have a set of Pioneer headphones that I paid $50 for that I can hear the difference all day. I can pass all the blind tests. Then I have a set of Audio Technica ATH-AD900X and I can't tell the difference to save my life. Same tracks. Same equipment. /shrug.


 
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cageymaru said:
I used to listen to Boston Acoustics test CD's back in the day when setting up car audio systems. Those and the Sheffield Labs CD's were awesome. Of course someone else broke into my home and decided that all of my installation equipment needed another home at a pawn shop I suppose.

To show how young I am, one of my favorites was Enya's Orinoco Flow. That entire CD was mesmerizing. Here is the crappy quality on Youtube.

The difference in 320 mp3 and FLAC is irritating to me personally. On one hand at high volumes who can really tell? Another aspect is that each person has different hearing capabilities so for one person it matters and to another it doesn't. I have a set of Pioneer headphones that I paid $50 for that I can hear the difference all day. I can pass all the blind tests. Then I have a set of Audio Technica ATH-AD900X and I can't tell the difference to save my life. Same tracks. Same equipment. /shrug.


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Firstly, 320kbps Ogg is not the same as 320kbps MP3 :p

That aside, my take is that it has less to do with how good someone's ears are, and more to do with whether or not they have been trained to listen for compression artifacting, as well as - as you say - how punishing your setup is on the source material.

I find that my DT770's are generally rather forgiving. I'll see if that holds up when I get my HD650's.

I have intentionally avoided reading up on, and and learning what compression artifacting sounds like, because it can be a good way to drive yourself insane.

Sometimes it ignorance IS bliss :p
 
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I hear you. :) I'm going to wait until the beginning of the year and replace the Audio Technica. I like the way they feel I suppose. They just tick me off with their soundstage. Everything sounds like a jumbled mess. Excellent for gaming though in titles with great positional sounds. Musically? Not my cup of tea.

I want to experiment with my old truck next Spring. Thinking of some excellent Audiofrog speakers, but I'm just too cheap to be honest. Probably will do some old JBL pro audio stuff off EBAY. Hope that weatherproofing them won't change their sound signature much. Dayton Audio has some AMT tweeters I want to try with those 8's, but JBL has a nice set of component speakers for my truck on closeout. Once again I'm probably too cheap to spend the money on that JBL component set. Funny thing is that I would buy the individual speakers and a DSP to use as an active crossover / time alignment unit without a concern about price just for the custom aspect of it. I miss my tools so bad. Depressing.
 
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i always liked this for acoustic.............
Eva Cassidy - Simply Eva\03 - People Get Ready


posting some songs with deep base, anyone care to add to it ????

A perfect circle - Lullaby

Daniel Lanois - Omni from the Slingbalde film

Flunk - Blue monday

Mudvayne - skrying, base drop @ about 3:25

AWOLNATION_-_2015_Run Dreamers
 
I've used foobar2k to set up a double blind test of 192kb/s mp3 and lossless wav files and tested it on both me and a friend and both of us failed to tell the difference on my hardware using Senn HD595 headphones. I used two test samples, classical music and rock. I've never passed any of those online tests either. I am older so high frequencies I don't hear as well as a young person so perhaps that is why.
 
rezerekted said:
I've used foobar2k to set up a double blind test of 192kb/s mp3 and lossless wav files and tested it on both me and a friend and both of us failed to tell the difference on my hardware using Senn HD595 headphones. I used two test samples, classical music and rock. I've never passed any of those online tests either. I am older so high frequencies I don't hear as well as a young person so perhaps that is why.
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MP3 codecs have come a long ways since the late 1990s. These days I doubt anyone other than the professionally trained listener could even know what to listen for and would probably have to observe the files through an audio spectrum analyzer first to be able to come up with a method of reliably telling the difference between 192kbps mp3 and FLAC. Things change and a lot of people still think mp3 codecs are like they were back in the napster days when 128, 192kbps rips were absolutely atrocious.

That said space is hardly an issue like it was back in the 1990s when it was a premium and limited to what you could fit on a CD. Storage space is exploding and it's becoming more convenient to keep audio in a higher quality archival format, if only to reduce the number of possible compression errors. It's really for the same reason that people dont feel obligated to compress their hard drive anymore to increase storage space.
 
pippenainteasy said:
MP3 codecs have come a long ways since the late 1990s. These days I doubt anyone other than the professionally trained listener could even know what to listen for and would probably have to observe the files through an audio spectrum analyzer first to be able to come up with a method of reliably telling the difference between 192kbps mp3 and FLAC. Things change and a lot of people still think mp3 codecs are like they were back in the napster days when 128, 192kbps rips were absolutely atrocious.

That said space is hardly an issue like it was back in the 1990s when it was a premium and limited to what you could fit on a CD. Storage space is exploding and it's becoming more convenient to keep audio in a higher quality archival format, if only to reduce the number of possible compression errors. It's really for the same reason that people dont feel obligated to compress their hard drive anymore to increase storage space.
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I feel like this is mostly the case too. Lame VBR with alt-preset standard or extreme was always pretty good, but there were many absolutely horrible encoders back then. Xing was one of the worst.

I wonder how many people are still biased against mp3's based on hearing old poorly encoded ones.

And mp3 isn't even the best compression algorithm for music. Ogg produces a slightly better result at the same bitrate.

I'm of the opinion that I probably could train my ears to hear compression artifacting in well encoded high bitrate files, but I don't want to, because then I'll hear them all the time, and ruin it for myself.

I use the highest quality setting in Spotify which is 320kbit Ogg, and I think it is perfectly acceptable.

My my MP3 collection is old, and back when I had the time to rip all my CD's I did not know how to rip things well, and what's worse, I had a drive starting to fail at one point, soany files have bad sector damage in them.

So the quality suffers.

At some point I need to grab the box from the basement and regional everything, but who knows when I'm going to get around to that. For now Spotify on highest quality settings is good enough, but it sucks when I can't find some of my favorite tracks, and have to go back to my old rips.
 
I read an article that said old poorly recorded music actually sounds better @128kb/s because distortion is in the high frequencies and using 128kb/s cuts off some of the distortion. Makes sense to me and there are some very badly recorded older music with lots of distortion in it. Even some stuff from the early 60s. Most of that music has very little bottom end too. Most of the decent recordings from back then I hear in jazz records.
 
[holy thread-bump Batman!]

Just a couple of tracks will get me over the line with a set of headphones.



Really good complexity of sound - modern beat with classical overtures really easily muddled by poor headphones.

Bubbles by Yosi Horikawa



If you don't spend the entire track looking around you for the source of the sound, don't buy whatever it is you're auditioning. It can flatter a terrible pair of headphones but you're looking for positioning not legibility.

I have also always liked Cannonball by Supertramp. It's not (by a long shot) their best album but this track had a really solid attacking bass which you need to feel as well as hear.

Finally a bit of classical and The Herbert Blomstedt and the San Francisco Orchestra take on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. You might better know one of the tracks, O Fortuna, as the music from the Omen. Yes it's a very overused classic but if you listen to the whole work those lows are so very low, and the highs are so very high and if you can actually make out the words of the choir then those headphones are keepers. When every instrument is bursting through to be heard and the choir trying ever harder to be legible through that wall, some cans will create a muddy indistinct cacophony.
 
Tiberian said:
Suffice to say those two CDs are all I need personally. There's a lot of great discs out there, some stuff from Steely Dan (outstanding audio quality and mastering from the original analog master sessions, those guys really seriously cared about audio quality, absolutely amazing), some older pure digital demo discs (the literal kind that had all sorts of interesting audio effects, one called "The Digital Domain" long ago had a pure digital recording of a 747 landing (and a helicopter too) and it was freakin' LOUD man, really loud and sounded awesome on the right system), and many many others but just those two I mentioned are all I need.
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CD? haven't stepped up to the lossless digital?
 
Subbed. I feel like I have more fun finding super high quality recordings just for how they sound then the love of the music. Having even mediocre gear makes crap recordings a struggle to listen to.
 
Pink Floyd - Another brink in the wall (all tracks combined) + whatever album/song I'm listening a lot at the given time.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Hey,

I thought it would be interesting to start a thread to see what all of you listen to to get an idea of how new audio hardware sounds when you get it, or when you are comparing things.

I'll start.

<clip>

I've added some links to show what the songs are, but the sources are not ideal. Most are spotify, which actually isn't terrible if you have a premium account and set it to high quality streaming. One is YouTube which is awful quality.


So, what are yours?
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Toto - Hold the Line - Opening with the piano and drums are a good test mid-bass response (not too "punchy" in the mid-bass) and overall clarity
Alison Kraus - Lucky One for acoustic mid-range response and sibilance
Sony XPlod Test Disc/Jensen Test Disc from 1995 for testing bass response/sine sweep to identify resonant frequencies of various enclosures/environment
The Cure/Depeche Mode/INXS - when testing for clarity and sibilance
Champaign - How 'Bout Us - the horns are great testing to see is the brass is too brassy
Cranberries - Linger/Zombie - Clarity/Frequency Response/Sibilance
Luther Vandross - Power of Love/Love Power/She's Alright - full range testing of frequency response/clarity
Marvin Gaye - Heard it Through the Grapevine/Let's Get it On/Sexual Healing - Great test of overall Frequency Response
 
These ones, that I finally located sitting in my main cd rack which I thought I checked. spent hours the other day looking for them.
I was putting away some discs that I ripped the other day and glanced at the other rack and they were sitting right there in front in plain sight, lol.

IMG_2138.JPG
 
Some good suggestions here.

A problem I've run into is that I'll be testing my equipment, and think I'll hear distortion, and sure enough, there is distortion there.

Then - of course - I'll play it back on many different listening systems and usually conclude that the distortion is actually in the recording, and not due to my setup. It's frustrating.

It would be nice to assemble a list of recordings know to be more or less distortion free so I don't have to do this.
 
Kind of offtopic, but I still have the receipt for this Elton John double CD I bought when I lived in Iceland back in 1991.
2490 Kronur was $41 in 1991.
37856916_2011941438824820_4276600259200679936_o.jpg 37858932_2011941392158158_4324215945976348672_o.jpg
 
I think my collection is about 80% mp3 with about 80% of that being ripped off CD that I have owned/borrowed from friends. The rest are FLAC rips and I even have a few Blueray audio sourced FLAC audio.

I think the Blue Ray FLAC audio I have ripped (5.1 channel support) vs the mp3 rips show an incredible amount of difference. To me its like the soundstage was compressed, or rather if you could picture instruments in Z space relative to you, they all lined up beside you on the mp3 rips. I think this stands out the most for mp3/flac comparisons. My favorite test songs are a blu ray rip from the anime Darker Than Black, has a lot of mix of jazzy tracks and synth tracks and vocals that can easily get muddied up.

For guitar tracks, I've pushed Smashing Pumpkins and Foo Fighters rips/CDs to test quality. Rocket from SP and My Hero from FF are songs which have quick transitions and layers which get muddied up with compression and bad setups.

Anime pop songs are good for testing the upper registers, Ghost In the Shell as mentioned above and tracks with Origa can really show treble harshness.

For bass heavy testing, I tend to lean to a mix of Deadmau5, Porter Robinson and Massive Attack. Angel from MA is an incredible track which can be butchered in the bass/mid bass range by bad compression/equipment combos. Dm5' A City in Florida will REALLY make your ears bleed with silbliance if your setup is treble happy in the DAC/AMP or headphones.

For equipment:
Fiio E3
GoDap Portable AMP
Audioengine D1 Amp/DAC
Liquid Carbon X Amp
Grace SDAC
ifi Micro SE Amp
Sony 5xx Series HT Amp
AKG K141 Studio
AKG K240
Shure 215SE
Shure 425SE
Fostex T50RP
Sennheiser 800HD
 
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