OP
- Thread Starter
- #21
Ja, I feel the same regarding the so called classical music. A term that is more often than right used wrong. I was kind of a fanboy when listening to "it" ( wrong term, that means ;-) through the 5 valve radio of my parents. But then electronica chimed in, again through the (German) Dampfradio. PGP sequencer and stuff like that, and / or the early Stockhausen, anybody? Steampunk by todays standards.
On the other hand, Stairways To Heaven is fun to listen to, but as a testprogram, I don't know. Wasn't it the last piece on a vinyl record? Last piece means least quality due to slowing down of the linear speed of the groove. All the sounds gets so congested. It starts clear with few instruments and becomes thicker and thicker, without actually changing loudness. Not to forget the accumulated dust at the needle, and accumulated wear out there. To me it more or less represents a practical joke of the sound engineer. Super drama, so close to going kitsch, good art alltogether, but as a test?
I agree in general, but for this test I decided I will not influence the participants' music choice in any way. Maybe it's true that this makes the test less widely applicable in some ways, but in other ways it's definitively more useful in its conclusions to those actually listening who would rather investigate the question of "what speakers do my favorite music sound best on?" (some of which include music the participants heard live at concerts in person) without some stuck-up "audiophile" telling them how poorly recorded/mastered some songs might be, or how their genre might not span enough of the frequency spectrum to be a reliable indicator of all the speakers' tradeoffs.
Aside from the general annoyance such a thing would cause, my worry with forcing a set of 'approved' test tracks on participants is that it puts them in a position to choose which speaker sounds best for a song they may not like at all, or may have no frame of reference of what it's 'supposed' to sound like otherwise.
Anyway, this is why in the full log I record the song being played (and I think there are enough genuinely high fidelity songs tested here to be useful), and reasonably detailed notes of the impressions of each song -- so you can select from the full list whatever songs you choose to be relevant, and take from the impressions whatever conclusions you want. Notes from "Participant 2" were sparse since that was me, since I've already written enough at length about my impressions of these speakers (and in this case my blind impressions matched exactly my expectations).
P.S. Regarding older songs, I was so impressed recently with this song from 1965 that is incredibly well mastered/recorded, given the era, that I used it as one of my test songs. It's really amazing the range of recording/mastering qualities that exist from just about any era.
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