If in the showroom, completely unfamiliar everything, probably the two key things are to see if it handles "big" stuff, driven hard, without falling to pieces - and whether it's a nasty load, requiring an extremely capable amplifier to produce solid SPLs - you stress test, and immediately cross the wusses off the list. Everything else can be sorted out later ...
That's not the case with music, it triggers responses - so, one has to switch into a different mode when using such: you're listening to a test signal designed to provoke poor behaviour from the system; it's like listening for artifacts in low rate mp3 encoding.
This is all very shaky stuff.
Umm, that mostly what I do with my music selection.. Mostly.
This is all very shaky stuff.
You walk into up to any completely strange system, plug your fav recordings into it, and hear what?
Your expected biases of the front end, amp, speakers, etc etc? A completely unfamiliar room?
We talk about this stuff over and over, how the ear/brain interface can't be trusted unless we remove sighted known influences from the equation.
All you can hope for is a best guess at how it sounds different from your known memory.
You might be able to get a general idea on a speaker in question where gross differences are possible. as to anything before it,
Fugeddaboudit
One of the most curious things I've come across in the audio game is this neurosis about "sighted bias" - mine works back to front, I expect the more spectacular the system, the uglier it will sound - 30 years of listening has confirmed this 'bias', nearly every time. If people can't actually "hear" what a system is getting wrong or right, then what the hell are they doing in the audio field ... ?
Sorry, that still is not going to work. I have heard, and read the arguments so many times I could do the patter myself - it's very much a case of doing a restricted level of testing, which confirms a set of assumptions about hearing, which are then extrapolated to include everything - if one can only see a small part of the picture then you devise experiments which confirm that POV, and learn nothing new. Overall, it's poor science - and a great shame that such is so ...
I actually went off and read, very carefully, some of the material that all these ideas are based on - and the controls were poor, there were so many assumptions, key parameters were never considered. I shake my head every time I try to read them, because the holes in the thinking are so obvious ...
