I’ve been using the same test tracks for about 2 years or so now.
-“Hotel California” by The Eagles (test all timbre and tonality, guitars and drums)
-“BBK” by Korn (upper mids and treble fatigue due to the guitar)
-“The Lion The Beast The Beat” by Grace Potter and The Nocturnals (female vocals)
-“Elevators” by Outkast (sub-bass)
-“I’ll Be Around” by The Spinners (good Motown song to test iffy recordings)
-“Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay (female vocals, keyboards, synth)
-“Hurricane” by Bob Dylan (acoustic guitars)
-“Digital Bath” by Deftones (distorted guitar, male vocals, percussion)
-“Superstar” by Carpenters (king of the female vocals test)
-“Low Rising” by The Swell Season (even though it is only a 16/44 track, it was recorded impeccably well. Has one of the blackest backgrounds I’ve ever heard. The song has multiple instruments and is layered very well).
-“Dreams” - Fleetwood Mac - one of the best recorded songs I know of. It has triple dubbed percussion in it due to Mick Fleetwood’s request during mixing…so you can get a great sense of percussion detail from this track.
Absolutely. Tusk is probably their best recorded album, though it is a polarizing album for many Fleetwood Mac fans. I personally love the album though.
Bass: Red handed, cloudlight, Chameleon, Holow, Bass drops Accoustics: Tin Pan Alley, take five, keith dont go live Vocals: no sanctury here, birds, troubles what you are in, my work, wonderful
I really don’t know what counts as a good test track. All I do is listen to songs I am very familiar with.
This is usually my go-to:
I think you just need to find what works best for you. Listen to songs you are the most familiar with and notice the differences in your experience with the gear. Besides, I think you should listen to the music that you like, (not what the “best test tracks” are) because you will be listening to that music anyways on that gear.
I do agree with you, as it is hard to substitute for experience in listening to a song often with different setups. Alhough there is a caveat. No matter how well you know a certain track, if it is recorded poorly or has a low bitrate, there would be limitations to how much information you would be able to extract. This is something I experienced with some tracks or albums where I owned previous versions that werent up to par. Although, it wasn’t extremely noticeable to me until I made some substantial upgrades to my chain and headphones.
That’s true. That is also why I have a great variety of music I am very familiar with, and so there is almost guaranteed to be some good recordings in there. Unless all you listen to is youtube mp3 rips lol. Then I don’t know what to tell ya.
I actually have noticed small differences with different FLAC bitrates. Believe it or not, sometimes the lower bitrate tracks can be better (though it is rare IME). An example is the Rush Moving PIctures album. I have a 24/48 and a 24/96 of that album. The 24/48 sounds better and less compressed to me, which is odd.
You might be listening to different masterings. I often prefer original CDs to remastered 24-192 downloads.
Also, Moving Pictures was mixed and mastered in digital, and given the digital equipment they had at the time, it probably means that the original master tape is probably close to redbook resolution, 16-44, and the latest downloads are upsampled. Either way, it’s an amazing sounding album, and there’s nothing wrong with redbook.
One of the biggest differences I hear between lossless flac and higher quality mp3s (320kbps +) is that everything seems to be mushed more into the mid range and all the pieces lack their own space. Lossless seems to space out this congestion and allows everything to raise up and be “less flat”.
This all depends on the track as well, which probably doesnt need to be said.
I’m always suprised by the amount of detail a well recorded redbook quality file can contain.
That’s not to throw a well done remaster under the bus. They can if done well, bring out a lot of additional information, detail or move the positioning of vocals which on some tracks really helps. But there are tracks that become completely different and not in a good way.
I find the more hand on artists tend to offer better quality remasters.
A lot of the better 24/192 remasters have better dynamic range than the originals, I do like the rush hires remasters.
It was probably originally mastered on DAT, so 48KHz 16bit, so there would have been loss mixing down to the final 16 bits and down sampling to 44KHz. Assuming they remixed it from the original master tracks, there is more information to be had in the source than there is in the final Redbook mix. And far less damage done in upsampling by 4x than down sampling by 44/48.
Having said that generally I agree, 44/16 is generally good enough, 24 bit mixes tend to remind me more of SACD, in that the engineers seem less concerned about dynamic range, so there tends to be less compression in the mix. I don’t notice higher bitrates as much as I do the additional dynamic range.
Lossy compressed audio generally be in mp3/aac or whatever tends to sound more congested, but it’s often really hard to tell unless you A/B or are very familiar with the uncompressed recording.
Here’s a great Track for Male Baritone vocals. If you don’t know Gregory porter, I highly recommend him. Warm, warm music filled with loooooooooovvveee tempered with a little heartache.
It’s interesting to me that you picked that particular track of Tool’s. I am re-listening, it’s an excellent choice.
They are one of my favorite bands, and I think pretty much all their stuff is recorded excellently. You can tell they are sticklers for the highest sound quality in their recordings.
I use songs I have listen to for years, that I know WELL.
So all changes from my current chain will be very obvious. I dont have specific songs for bass etc.
Today I added Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur on Rio. Highly recommend this track; Remastered in 2001. It’s got stage, good dynamics, excellent detail and even better micro details. A lot of everything you want to hear in a good recording.
This is a particular example of doing a remaster right. I’ve been revisiting a lot of my original 80s CD rips and some of them leave quite a bit to be desired. There are a lot of very good recording, so it’s not like it’s a pervasive problem, but a lot of the music I listened to as a kid, well it was generally off a car radio or a cassette that I recorded off of the radio or a CD I played on a $99 CD player, the cheapest in Crazy Eddie that was connected to my Fisher Receiver.
Going back to some of this music on my system today. Wow.
