Best Test CD

The test CDs you mentioned are mainly for system calibration. You need different music to fully evaluate a system. These are what I used when I was shopping for speakers.

1. Master of Chinese Percussion track 1, The Poem of Drums – this is a 10 minus not-stop action of drums in different sizes. This is the one CD that separates men from boys in bass reproduction.
2. Audiophile Reference IV SACD, First Impression Music – This is a dual layer hybrid SACD and HDCD that can be played on regular CD players. It contains 16 tracks of music of all kinds; including jazz, solo instruments, chamber music, vocal, cello, violin, etc, all extremely well recorded and very musical. If you can play all these tracks well, you have a pretty decent system.
3. Fanfare for the Common Man, Reference Recording – A well recorded orchestra piece. Great for evaluating sound staging, and dynamic.
4. Lang Lang Live at Seiji Ozawa Hall SACD, Telarc – Piano is one of the most difficult instruments to reproduce well. I used to test system with other piano music until recently I discover this dual layer hybrid SACD.

I hope this helps.

Listen to the music you will listen to at home. If it sounds good, it is good. Unless of course you listen to test tones while making dinner or at dinner parties. Then test with that. When I look at a painting I ask, does it it move me, not what are the light-fast qualities of the pigments. Likewise for music; how does it sound to your ears... Let it sound right to you, not according to some technician's yard stick.

I recommend using well recorded music that you are familiar with already. You should listen for details and dynamics that were not detected on your current system.

If you listen to music, shouldn't you test with music?

Chesky test disks are great, how ever I prefer Shefield it does all sorts of wonderful technical things, that have absolutly NO enjoyment to them, but it accomplishes a few tasks very well. Though the Chesky disks have a great stage depth track on them, which shefields "My Disk" doesn't have. ~Tim

The Ayre/Cardas disc is a great one: refer to this link...
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?htech&1015012537&read&keyw&zzayre

My vote would be use two discs. A stereophile disc or similar for tones and frequencies and a Burmester Art for Ear volume two. It has a ton of different types of music and is really well recorded.

All I've ever used was music to test with. My fav is Alana Davis' "Blame It On Me." Its just dam good music!!! Where can one purchase the Chesky's test cd?