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DanTreview
159
Feb 7, 2019
  • "Good Morning Beautiful" by The The (rock/pop mixture, lush production, lots going on, etc.). The whole album is mixed and mastered beautifully. On "Good Morning Beautiful" specifically, the listener can get swallowed up in Johnny Marr's guitar effects (a good thing), as they swirl about, Matt Johnson's voice is distorted, and the rest of the instrumentation is lush and tight. It's my go-to for overall presentation of my everyday listening.
  • Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" - can't remember the composer, but it's a good test for string attenuation and the "harshness" of horns, and it's my only 24/88 Blu-ray recording, which is rare. Two birds with one stone.
  • "Shout" by Tears for Fears. The mix is really, really deep. Lots going on. Took Steven Wilson an ungodly amount of time to remix it a few years ago. Get the Blu-ray version. Also a good test for 24/96, if your DAC can handle that without over-sampling, or if your DAC over-samples, if it's doing so without introducing all sorts of crap into the audible spectrum.
  • "Us and Them" by Pink Floyd. The chorus creates a wall of mid-range distortion on most sub-par headphones and speakers, so if the chorus comes out clean, then we're on to something...
  • "Discard Your Fear" by Riverside. There's this part in the middle with an over-processed bass and guitar crunch together, and which nearly overloads most drivers on the low-end, so again, if this comes out clean, then we're all set.
  • "Y2K Groove" by Fattburger. A lush recording in the 'smooth jazz' genre, it touches on all the ranges my music usually requires (electronic percussion, natural percussion, triangles, horns, guitar, bass, etc. etc.). Also the end of the 'golden age of mastering CDs properly' within the smooth jazz genre. Eventually, overblown loudness and compression caught up to it, albeit 15 years later than it hit the rock and pop scene.
  • "The End" by The Doors. Lots going on in this one, as well as being able to pull out artifacts left over from the recording of the music, as well as the storm effects in the intro and coda. While a lot of people don't like tape hiss and what not, it is there, and if a good set of headphones can pull out those subtleties, that's a good sign.
  • "Running with the Devil" by Van Halen. I (mostly) hate this band, but one great thing about early VH recordings, is that Eddie's guitar work was recorded with a microphone on the floor next to his amp, and then run through another set of effects for additional reverb and what not. In the mixing process, all that analog processing is shoved to the left channel on their earlier albums, for what reason I have no idea. So it comes out of your headphones sounding lopsided, compared to nearly everyone else. So if you listen to early VH albums, your left ear gets most of what Eddie is doing, and it can be a bit distracting. However, one thing this does is it really opens up the right channel to hear quiet, low-level stuff going on in the studio, even at one point the phone ringing in the sound booth.
  • "More Than a Feeling" by Boston. The reason I use this (and early Steve Miller Band albums, as well as the Doobie Brothers, too) is to hear a headphone handle multiple vocal harmony parts together with rock music of 100 beats per minute or more.
  • "Black Cow" by Steely Dan. Steely Dan's "Aja" album is by far one of the best recording and mastering jobs I've ever heard, and I have an enormous collection. I use this album to demo my equipment. The beauty of this album is it allows for "space" between the notes, nothing is compressed egregiously, and sounds like it was recorded yesterday (it's over 40 years old). So if "Black Cow" (or any song on this album) comes out clean, bright, warm, and lush, it's the ultimate litmus test for me.
Of course, as an audiofoole, all of this is deeply subjective... ;-)
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