To get back to the thread
, I would think that one must take along music that one is intimately familiar with, or at least familiar with to a good extent. It's nice to have discs like Chesky's Ultimate, etc, but they will serve their purpose if the listener has familiarised himself beforehand. My test CD consisted of the following tracks, for reasons explained against each track (of course, your mileage will vary):
1. Rebecca Pidgeon - Spanish Harlem (female voice, resolving between very closely spaced instruments)
2. Mozart - Piano Sonata No 11 in A Major K.331 (right handed piano sound, piano transients)
3. Jim Reeves - I'll Fly Away (baritone voice handling, and noise handling as this old record was qiute noisy)
4. Alan Parsons Project - Limelight (beautiful transient attack and decay in the intro)
5. River of Sorrow - Hui Fen Min (Erhu) and Michelle Li (Yang Qin) - extremely high dynamics, and nice string sound)
6. Tears in Heaven - Ayako Hosokawa (beautiful female voice and a slur sexier than Smokie Robinson's)
7. Alan Jackson - Bring On the Night (baritone voice, violin and piano)
8. Steely Dan - Home At Last (sax and drum transient responses)
9. Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water (hard rock)
10. Vince Gill - Look at Us (very light and airy sound)
11. Queen - Another Bites The Dust (pounding bass line)
12. Tears for Fears - Women in Chains (stereo imaging and sound staging)
13. Evanescense - Bring Me To Life (not a particularly good number but one can't deny its loud!)
14. Dire Straits - Water of Love (low bass and low freq drums)
15. John Barry - Long and Winding Road (nice song, I like it more than the orig Beatles)
16. Extreme - More Than Words (acoustic guitar and hall ambience)
17. The Police Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic (another nice song!)
If one wants to go to subterranean bass, then one must consider something like Christian McBride playing acoustic standing bass for Diana Krall, or classical organ passages where the lowest registers can go down to 32 Hz. If you will listen to classical, I strongly recommend Handel's Messiah choral works for the dynamic variations - this can be very frustrating to listen to without remote as the low passage are too low and need to be jacked up, and loud passages are too loud and needs to be toned down. Sometimes, a normalised MP3 is easier on the ear!
Of course, I didn't inflict all the tracks on the hapless shopwallah!
Right now, my reference album on both LP and CD is Steely Dan's Aja. This album, to my mind, is what a good mastering should be. I thought my Euro pressing and the MoFi pressing were good, when I listened to malvai's limited edition Cisco pressing. This one is tighter than a rodent's gluteus:lol:
, I would think that one must take along music that one is intimately familiar with, or at least familiar with to a good extent. It's nice to have discs like Chesky's Ultimate, etc, but they will serve their purpose if the listener has familiarised himself beforehand. My test CD consisted of the following tracks, for reasons explained against each track (of course, your mileage will vary):1. Rebecca Pidgeon - Spanish Harlem (female voice, resolving between very closely spaced instruments)
2. Mozart - Piano Sonata No 11 in A Major K.331 (right handed piano sound, piano transients)
3. Jim Reeves - I'll Fly Away (baritone voice handling, and noise handling as this old record was qiute noisy)
4. Alan Parsons Project - Limelight (beautiful transient attack and decay in the intro)
5. River of Sorrow - Hui Fen Min (Erhu) and Michelle Li (Yang Qin) - extremely high dynamics, and nice string sound)
6. Tears in Heaven - Ayako Hosokawa (beautiful female voice and a slur sexier than Smokie Robinson's)
7. Alan Jackson - Bring On the Night (baritone voice, violin and piano)
8. Steely Dan - Home At Last (sax and drum transient responses)
9. Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water (hard rock)
10. Vince Gill - Look at Us (very light and airy sound)
11. Queen - Another Bites The Dust (pounding bass line)
12. Tears for Fears - Women in Chains (stereo imaging and sound staging)
13. Evanescense - Bring Me To Life (not a particularly good number but one can't deny its loud!)
14. Dire Straits - Water of Love (low bass and low freq drums)
15. John Barry - Long and Winding Road (nice song, I like it more than the orig Beatles)
16. Extreme - More Than Words (acoustic guitar and hall ambience)
17. The Police Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic (another nice song!)
If one wants to go to subterranean bass, then one must consider something like Christian McBride playing acoustic standing bass for Diana Krall, or classical organ passages where the lowest registers can go down to 32 Hz. If you will listen to classical, I strongly recommend Handel's Messiah choral works for the dynamic variations - this can be very frustrating to listen to without remote as the low passage are too low and need to be jacked up, and loud passages are too loud and needs to be toned down. Sometimes, a normalised MP3 is easier on the ear!
Of course, I didn't inflict all the tracks on the hapless shopwallah!
Right now, my reference album on both LP and CD is Steely Dan's Aja. This album, to my mind, is what a good mastering should be. I thought my Euro pressing and the MoFi pressing were good, when I listened to malvai's limited edition Cisco pressing. This one is tighter than a rodent's gluteus:lol:
