Music to evaluate Speakers and System

This is a topic that comes up regularly and, after a slow start, garners a fairly long list. The bottom line, however, is that it does not matter what others use since the most important factor is YOUR familiarity with the recording, not its genre or technical issues. The only way to hear anything that will distinguish the sound from what you know is to eliminate as many variables as possible. Using a familiar recording is essesntial. Too bad one cannot use the same acoustics!

Kal

Mrtennis-

When making evaluations with more than one unknown parameter, e.g., new speaker and new recording in a new system/room, one cannot determine what accounts for all the discovered sound differences. It is a mathematical/logical impossibility.

Even if you play 5 different (unfamiliar CDs) and they share the same characteristic, you can only ascribe that characteristic to the system if you know (and you don't, of course) that those recordings do not, in fact, share that characteristic.

Kal

I disagree that one should use whatever one likes.

That is not what I or anyone else said. We emphasized that the recordings need to be familiar but no one said that they should be restricted to a single type or genre.

A system should play everything well unless one is happy to predispose what one can play and enjoy to one genre or another.

Agreed.

Kal