Great stuff here, I absolutely love threads like this. Here are my three picks:
- Roger Waters / Amused to Death / Too Much Rope - The track starts with a man chopping wood and each stroke and should have a hard edge defined center image position. This is followed by a horse drawn carriage with a sleigh bell moving across the sound stage from left to right. You should be able to pick up the horse and sleigh far beyond the boundary of your speakers and it should disappear far beyond the boundary of your speaker as well.
- Mose Allison / Everybody Cryin’ Mercy - This track is great for gauging attack and decay in a system. It’s all about the soft attacks and lengthy delays Allison puts on his piano as well as the drummer and bassist. A good system should be able to define the leading edge of notes and their diminishing departure.
- Rage Against the Machine / Bullet in the Head - When I started down my audiophile journey, bass something I did not lend much thought to. But after reading columns and posts about how important bass is to a system’s synergy, imaging and sound stage I finally stated to pay closer attention to how I treated bass in my system. With this tracks, at the end, a system with good bass will pick out plenty of detail in the fast finale and you should be able to hear the slap of the strings, not just a wall of noise, especially when the extra layers of guitar come into the mix.