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Dr. Sean Olive on 35 Years of “Fast Car”
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I sure agree with not using Country music. I too have a handful of exceptions (John Hiatt).
MAB
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Thanks for this. You always find these gems of historical information. I never get tired of this song or the album.
As a fan of Tracey Chapman music before I became familiar with Harman testing, I found it pleasant that it was in the track list. That said, there is a negative emotion that came to me when I heard the playlist in the testing thinking "this is all older music." I guess for that reason, my own playlist for testing speakers/headphones is much more modern. And is music that I already very much liked.
D
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I get too tripped up on the sadness of the Fast Car lyrics to use it as a test track. It’s a very powerful song; kudos to Tracy Chapman.
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
I agree with @amirm on this, too many tracks have been ruined by HiFi stores, HiFi shows and 'testers' over the years.
Fast Car is one of them. I can't listen to it.
I remember at the launch of Compact Disc, every stand was playing Jarre's Oxygene- and I loved that music at the time, but it annoyed me they cheapened the music to a single track to demonstrate the 'space age sound of CD'.
Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat was in every HiFi store on rotation, as was Donald Fagen's Nightfly which took me 20 years before I could listen to it again.
At least I think Diana Krall is out of demo rotation isn't she? No great loss there.
But then again, you sometimes hear something new. I remember walking into a HiFi store and heard Erykah Badu's Baduizm in about 1997 on some smallish Sonus Fabers and thought, OK, this is interesting, so went and ordered the CD. She was obviously becoming huge in the US, but nobody here knew anything about her. Now, we'd call her music old and done, 25 years later...
Fast Car is one of them. I can't listen to it.
I remember at the launch of Compact Disc, every stand was playing Jarre's Oxygene- and I loved that music at the time, but it annoyed me they cheapened the music to a single track to demonstrate the 'space age sound of CD'.
Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat was in every HiFi store on rotation, as was Donald Fagen's Nightfly which took me 20 years before I could listen to it again.
At least I think Diana Krall is out of demo rotation isn't she? No great loss there.
But then again, you sometimes hear something new. I remember walking into a HiFi store and heard Erykah Badu's Baduizm in about 1997 on some smallish Sonus Fabers and thought, OK, this is interesting, so went and ordered the CD. She was obviously becoming huge in the US, but nobody here knew anything about her. Now, we'd call her music old and done, 25 years later...
Easy solution- just don't tell people your test tracks on the Internet, in case it becomes viral and kills one of your favourite songs...
Ask your local musician what track they are set up their gear (you'd be surprised that some of guys have perfect pitch and can detect resonances without measurements, and can EQ for neutrality)
Visit non-English speaking audio shows...
Ask your local musician what track they are set up their gear (you'd be surprised that some of guys have perfect pitch and can detect resonances without measurements, and can EQ for neutrality)
Visit non-English speaking audio shows...
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restorer-john
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Just use pink noise. It's free to make, has no copyright issues, does a better job than music and is guaranteed to send everyone but you out the listening room door so you can listen in peace.
Is a "masterfully mastered" piece of genius work. I have it on both vinyl and CD and I have to say that the vinyl, despite everything that is physically, metaphorically, spiritually, and psychologically wrong with its obviously inferior medium, sounds f-ing great. IMHO.
Have been listening to this for 41 years and still not tired of it. Probably still listen to it weekly (stereo or 5.1). One of my favourite albums of all time.
MaxwellsEq
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That's a great article, thanks for pointing it out. I got to see her perform live when she first toured this album. It was a very simple set -- mostly just her playing acoustic guitar and singing, with a few tracks with her backing band. It was marvelous, but lacked a bit of variation.
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I agree with @amirm on this, too many tracks have been ruined by HiFi stores, HiFi shows and 'testers' over the years.
Fast Car is one of them. I can't listen to it.
I remember at the launch of Compact Disc, every stand was playing Jarre's Oxygene- and I loved that music at the time, but it annoyed me they cheapened the music to a single track to demonstrate the 'space age sound of CD'.
Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat was in every HiFi store on rotation, as was Donald Fagen's Nightfly which took me 20 years before I could listen to it again.
At least I think Diana Krall is out of demo rotation isn't she? No great loss there.
But then again, you sometimes hear something new. I remember walking into a HiFi store and heard Erykah Badu's Baduizm in about 1997 on some smallish Sonus Fabers and thought, OK, this is interesting, so went and ordered the CD. She was obviously becoming huge in the US, but nobody here knew anything about her. Now, we'd call her music old and done, 25 years later...
The only place I ever heard the track Spanish Harlem by Rebecca Pidgeon was in audio store after audio store, and audio shows.
Even as recently as a couple years ago, an audio dealer put on that as a demo and I’m thinking, really? God dammit have we not moved beyond this bloody track?
I could never listen to it on my own, and Diana Krall has likewise been pretty much ruined for me.
Perhaps I’m a masochist, but I watch YouTube audio demo videos from audiophile channels, as well as lots of videos from audio shows, and I’m just so damn sick of whispery female vocals with sparse acoustic accompaniment. It’s the most predictable and boring thing in the world and I can’t believe audiophiles keep going to this over and over.
Even in many of the comments under YouTube videos you see people saying “can you please play some real music?”
I think there are two reasons for this:
- Sparse recordings better highlight many of the things audiophiles like to go on about, such as decay, imaging, etc. It can be useful (as Dr. Olive points out), making it easier to isolate certain effects, but sometimes what is being sold as a characteristic of the speaker is really a characteristic of the recording. You're not going to hype "inter-note blackness" with a big band recording, for example.
- Many - I would argue most - speakers don't convincingly reproduce large-volume performances. And by "large volume", I don't even mean rock concerts, but (for example) jazz combos of more than a few players performing lively pieces.
MRC01
Major Contributor
Fast Car is a good recording, one of the few that audiophiles rave about that actually sounds good. Most of the others (Diana Krall, Rebecca Pigeon, etc.) sound artificial. I never listen to it because it's been so over-played but just now I pulled the original CD off my shelf and gave it a listen. Fast Car does sound pretty natural, has deep bass that is also tight not bloated, and is not dynamically compressed. It's far better than other popular music recordings, but that is a very low bar. I agree with Olive's statement:
When I heard it, I just thought it was well-recorded compared to a lot of other contemporary albums. It was fairly well balanced—perhaps a bit bright, but it had music that went from the lowest lows to the highest overtones, and when we played it through the speakers we were testing, you could clearly hear the differences between them.
When I heard it, I just thought it was well-recorded compared to a lot of other contemporary albums. It was fairly well balanced—perhaps a bit bright, but it had music that went from the lowest lows to the highest overtones, and when we played it through the speakers we were testing, you could clearly hear the differences between them.
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
The girly sounding, wispy off-key, voice breaking cannot-actually-sing stuff drives me nuts. Some of these voices sound like pre-teens and grown men are listening to it at audio shows. Weird if you ask me.
DSJR
Major Contributor
We unkindly referred to her as 'Greasy Chip-pan' as we used this record so much for dems (same with Joan 'Armourplating' some years before)...
TC did a lovely song on her followup album - Oh my Lord how I understand now...
TC did a lovely song on her followup album - Oh my Lord how I understand now...
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Well I like Rebecca Pidgeon. I was experienced enough as an audiophile to know how ruined recordings can get. So other than listening for myself I would stop anyone trying to demo something to me using it. I didn't want it ruined. Diana Krall hasn't been much to my liking anyway. So demo away.
An odd recording I thought was good for demo that doesn't fit the mold were tracks from Freddie King's "Texas Cannonball". You have to like electric blues. Was something of a live in a bar recording. It is from 1972 so all analog sourced. It sounds pretty close to live. You can hear some patrons slowly getting smashed as the show goes on. I wondered if it was minimally recorded it was so good at some aspects of space and such. Nope. Lots of miking, and tons of processing. Whoever did some of the delay/reverb effects and such were geniuses at making that sound reasonably real. Or maybe I'm too prone to be sipping whiskey when I listen to it too.
What was surprising was when I recognized her in The Unit and sort of discovered she was really an actress to the rest of the world as opposed to a singer.
I credit Chesky’s demo CD as a key reason why Spanish Harlem was such an iconic demo track. I still think that disc is a great one. It does tell you what to hear, leading to some bias, but it is a single disc with a lot of variety and Spanish Harlem was the very first musical track in an era where you had to bring your own discs to dealers and there was no guarantee that CD-Rs would work.
Ultimate Demonstration Disc: Chesky Records' Guide to Critical Listening, by Various Artists
30 track album
cheskyrecords.bandcamp.com
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