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Critical (Best) Music Tracks for Speaker and Room EQ Testing

dualazmak

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North_Sky

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Good ^ to test those surround (rubber) woofers.
 

30 Ounce

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I wasn’t expecting much from this but I was wrong. This is very impressive with incredibly deep bass and excellent soundstage demonstrations.
FF2ECE15-0DBC-4E26-87FE-C5D843BB824B.jpeg
 

RichB

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Albums are selling well in 2020 ...

* Can they embed MQA into a LP music recording?

High-priced cables are selling well. ;)

Digital mastering can be so bad that the limitations imposed by vinyl can force the production of a better recording.
However, I prefer to support better mastering by not purchasing the inferior medium.

- Rich
 

Vapor9

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A few of my fav evaluation tracks...

Tom Waits - Mule Variations, Hold On
St. Vincent - MassEducation, Slow Disco
Diana Krall - Live in Paris, The Look of Love
The Door - LA Woman, Riders on the Storm (remastered)
 

ferrellms

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I tend to use Lyle Lovett's "Road to Ensenada" for two reasons. There are some vocal inflections and imperfections that I like to see if I can hear. And he uses what I think are bass pedals and hits a series of low notes of different frequencies. If you can get all of the bass pedal notes to sound the same in terms of volume, then your bass is dialed in properly (I have yet to succeed at this).

They could be bass pedals or any of a million software programs or hardware synths that will produce the low bass tones digitally. A nice feature of digital is just how easy it is to crank the lowest bass at the highest volume. Nice recording!
 

Vintage57

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When I played this song and measured from my LP. I used my FFT analyzer to get the results on this graph.
I get bass down to 32 Hz. Not exotic but a tool for comparison. I don’t know if there’s much below that. I don’t reproduce it.
Set up at; Full range, c-weighing, peak hold, 1/3 oct.
I like the song and have now listened to more Lyle Lovett. Thanks

9779DA84-3ECC-4D84-93B1-072D3FAB0348.jpeg
 

dasdoing

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yesterday we had a very close thunder here (one or 2 seconds after lightning). I imidietly thought to myself "If only I could have recorded that with my Dayton mic". the following thunder was already far away.
Imo a thunder is perfect since we perfectly know how it should sound. So I went and looked for some files. This is a very nice I found (4.0): https://freesound.org/people/BlueDelta/sounds/446753/
 

fun

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· “Toy Soldier March”, Reference Recording
Anybody has more specific information about the "Toy Soldier March" piece, like the label, album, performers etc.? There are a few "Toy Soldier March" on Spotify, but nothing about "Reference Recording". Thank you!
 

fragzone

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back on topic (somewhat) ...
Eva Cassidy Live at Blues Alley should be a goto recording, even with all its warts. Recorded 1996, well respected, but it's recording quality is all over the place. Much limiting in many songs, some cuts, however, were aloud to breath, esp when just her & guitar.

What a song list (live) ...
  1. "Cheek to Cheek" (Irving Berlin) – 4:03
  2. "Stormy Monday" (T-Bone Walker) – 5:49
  3. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (Paul Simon) – 5:33
  4. "Fine and Mellow" (Billie Holiday) – 4:03
  5. "People Get Ready" (Curtis Mayfield) – 3:36
  6. "Blue Skies" (Irving Berlin) – 2:37
  7. "Tall Trees in Georgia" (Buffy St. Marie)– 4:05
  8. "Fields of Gold" (Sting) – 4:57
  9. "Autumn Leaves" (Joseph Kosma, Johnny Mercer, Jacques Prévert) – 4:57
  10. "Honeysuckle Rose" (Andy Razaf, Thomas "Fats" Waller) – 3:14
  11. "Take Me to the River" (Al Green, Mabon "Teenie" Hodges) – 3:51
  12. "What a Wonderful World" (Bob Thiele, George David Weiss) – 5:50
  13. "Oh, Had I a Golden Thread" (Pete Seeger) – 4:46 [Studio recording]
Tall Trees is an impressive DR13, easily the highest on the list. Most of this album is ~DR8, including my favorite track Bridge Over ...
View attachment 2090

Limited, but it sounds soft.

And let's not forget that her version of Fields of Gold (DR11) will happily help anyone in need of forgetting about Sting (sorry, if that sounded mean).
Eva Cassidy is one of my favourites. But what is wrong with Sting?
 

dualazmak

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Are you talking about this, "Fields of Gold / Sting" sang by Eva Cassidy, from the album "Songbird"?
 

dualazmak

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Just for your reference, and if you are interested in, please find here the latest music sampler playlist (including Fields of Gold sang by Eva Cassidy) I am using for frequent check of my multichannel multi-driver (multi-way) multi-amplifier stereo audio system.

The list also contains this;
 

NiagaraPete

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Almost any track on Kate Bush’s Fifty Words for Snow.
 
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