Always very interesting to see what counts as good demo tracks in the audiophile world. To me, they wouldn't be good demos...
Most of them, to my mind, are '2D' and have a hard edged over-the-top this-is-audiophile-music 'detail' to them. Or they are jazz, which again I don't think makes for a good demo. I really couldn't tell how good a system was with most of these tracks.
I cite Elton John's Rocket Man as a contrast to these demo tracks. It was put together in a studio, obviously, but it has warmth and room-scale (not artificial cathedral) 'ambience', detail and a sense of real space (no pun intended). Classical, of course, is an even bigger test of a system, and I don't mean polite string quartets or harpsichord solos.
I think we need to hear how a system handles voices and real instruments going from quiet to loud in a natural, organic way. We need to hear an organically-shifting composite of many different types of instruments to reveal system 'formants', and we need complexity to reveal intermodulation distortion. Typical audiophile music goes the opposite way - I wonder why?
My only problem with using the actual Rocket Man track is that the music is so good I wouldn't want to waste it listening to horrible systems at shows
.
Most of them, to my mind, are '2D' and have a hard edged over-the-top this-is-audiophile-music 'detail' to them. Or they are jazz, which again I don't think makes for a good demo. I really couldn't tell how good a system was with most of these tracks.
I cite Elton John's Rocket Man as a contrast to these demo tracks. It was put together in a studio, obviously, but it has warmth and room-scale (not artificial cathedral) 'ambience', detail and a sense of real space (no pun intended). Classical, of course, is an even bigger test of a system, and I don't mean polite string quartets or harpsichord solos.
I think we need to hear how a system handles voices and real instruments going from quiet to loud in a natural, organic way. We need to hear an organically-shifting composite of many different types of instruments to reveal system 'formants', and we need complexity to reveal intermodulation distortion. Typical audiophile music goes the opposite way - I wonder why?
My only problem with using the actual Rocket Man track is that the music is so good I wouldn't want to waste it listening to horrible systems at shows
.
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