Radiohead’s Amnesiac album is a favorite test album here. It tests many things about a high fidelity audio system that most other albums do not.
Many people say test tracks must be music where the musicians use exclusively acoustic instruments. That one can only compare a reproduction of the sound of a musical instrument to an instrument whose sound one is familiar with in the real world. The ‘absolute sound’.
First, people who use this technique aren’t any better, in my experience, at understanding what they are hearing when listening to a system than anybody else. And maybe a little below average at that.
Second, real acoustic instruments have a wide variety of sounds e.g. all guitars do not sound alike. So, which one are they comparing the sound on the stereo to?
Third, most acoustic instruments are extremely easy to reproduce. All percussion, flutes, most instruments in a 3- or 4-piece jazz composition, etc.
Fourth, classical music, the gold standard of acoustic music, is usually recorded so badly that it is largely just a wall of sound. Great systems help; but still, poor, so poor, oh so poor quality.
OK. Back to Radiohead. Back to heavily processed very complex very well-recorded music.
Using consensus-based evaluation, after listening to a track on many different systems, at least some of which do not suck, one learns where sounds are supposed to come from: their location in the sound stage, how far away they are, how large they are, where the are moving to, what the decay is supposed to be, etc.
One learns that some systems can disambiguate a pair of notes and some cannot.
One learns that some systems can communicate that the vocals are full of angst and others the vocalists always sound bored [voice is the only overlap with the ‘absolute sound’ people, though they seem to not pay much attention at all to this ‘most popular acoustical instrument EVER’ that we all are so familiar with – especially those with talkative spouses :-)]
One learns that many of the sounds on these tracks are so weird that they are extremely hard for inferior systems to reproduce at all well – it often will sound like something is broken (though sometimes that is the way it is ‘supposed’ to sound 🙂 ) [whereas reproducing a violin or piano, possibly the most complex acoustic instruments, can be done by the most modest of stereo systems well enough to fool some people all of the time].
Anyway, Radiohead in general is great for testing hifi systems, and especially the later albums where the quality continues to improve. Amnesiac is just the first Radiohead album that I happened to fall in love with.
Anyway, that is our opinion and these techniques have worked well for us. For example, they are extremely useful when we want to know immediately the capabilities of an unknown system.
