Songs you use when auditioning gear

@ danager - apology accepted! It's noble of you to do so.

"Chrome"  by Joe Jackson - specifically to test whether a system preserves timing information.

Shelby Lynne's Just A Little Lovin' for ambience recovery.

Regarding Steely Dan, I don't find Gaucho to be particularly useful as a test disc. The parts on that album were overdubbed and re-recorded so many times - on analogue tape -  that it's lacking a lot of harmonic information. I do love the album musically, however.

@danager With due respect you, are wrong. Aaurally, it clear that the source for Gaucho is not digital. There is confusion because of their use of the Wendel digital drum machine/sampler. For one reference source regarding the recording, see the following from Sound on Sound (Recording industry magazine) "When working on Gaucho (1980), they pioneered the use of engineer Roger Nichols' freshly developed Wendel sampling drum machine and audio sampler (12.5kHz/12-bit) for drums and percussion. An indication of the amount of overdubbing, splicing, and re-recording that went into their quest for perfection was that Nichols and Scheiner used up 360 rolls of tape recording Gaucho."

The Sony, Soundstream and Mitsubishi digital multitracks used in the early eighties have a very distinctive sound - see Donald Fagen's The Nightfly, Ry Cooder' Bop Till You Drop and Pat Benatar's Tropico albums for examples. They sound different to recordings that were made on Studer and Otari 24/48 track analogue even where those recordings were mastered to digital - for example Rush's Moving Pictures which was recorded on a Studer A800 but mastered on to a Sony PCM 1610.