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Reference CDs

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What are your choices for CDs which sound fantastic, sonically? The ones you play to test out a stereo, if you ever do….and does anyone have experience of those audio test/reference CDs?

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  3. still play Supertramp – Crime of the Century

    an ECM album say jarrett and charlie haden

    a pristine sunny ade record for the lower register

    and some clean acoustic guitar – jan akkerman usually

  4. Any of those pink label Island record thigymebobbies with the name Joe Boyd, John Wood. Sound Techniques Studio, Witchseason attached to it does the job for me! Although the other day i threw on my old vinyl KInd Of Blue and that also blew me away. almost like the band was playing right in my basement, Those early JJ Cale records also comes to mind!

  5. The Trinity Sessions – Cowboy Junkies. If you can hear the room it’s a good thing.
    Angel – Massive Attack. A spacious bottom end.
    Some piano music. Debussy or Chopin usually. If it can convincingly reproduce the sound of a piano this is again a good thing.
    Agree wholeheartedly with Junior on his nomination for clean acoustic guitar. My go to album for kit testing in the past was always Six and Twelve String Guitar by Leo Kottke. Now I think I would reach for Trainsongs by Michael Chapman.

    • Haha Pencil, Trinity Sessions here too. On a bad system or headphone the room disappears.

      Also Lexicon Of Love, Dare, London Calling and All Mod Cons cos I know them inside out.

      • Lexicon of Love, at least my copy, sounds vile – a tinny, brittle mess. Fabulous album but sounds crap. I have often thought to load up the tracks in my music pc to remaster it a bit but never got round to it. Is there a nice sounding version then?

        • Lexicon is still overly shiny, polished to the point of brittleness. But I know it inside out, the remaster is a little better than the original, but the production is there, remastering doesn’t change what Horn did back then.

      • Yes. Direct to 2-track 16/48 DAT with a stereo ambisonic mic. There was a remastered version on gold CD released by Classic Records in the mid-90’s, but really not worth your cash – the original sounds great.

  7. The reference stuff I tend to use to show off / test a stereo tend to be high definition (24 bit / 96khz or higher) albums these days. A few that come to mind….

    – Muddy Waters / Folk Singer – very acoustic album (including a young Buddy Guy on acoustic guitar) which really shows off the “space” in the music.
    – Supertramp / Crime Of Tne Century – agree with Junior here. The recent remaster (especially the 24/96) sounds superb
    – Pink Floyd / Wish you Were Here – again as mentioned above, the recent remaster.
    – Dire Straits / Love Over Gold – a rip of the Japanese SACD which was a flat transfer (no compression) and has a great dynamic range.
    – Bill Evans / Waltz For Debbie – crystal clear, great dynamics
    – anything by Steven Wilson – the man know his recording……
    – Diana Krall / The Girl In The Other Room – especially “Almost Blue” – sounds like she is right there in the room with you (and not obviously in the other room….)

  8. Live through this by Hole is often used to test out hi fi. It doesn’t have to be remastered half speed cuts to put put audio kit through its paces.

  10. Back in the days when I was an audiophile nut – one the discs of choice for one of the snotty HI Fi rags was, as I recall, ‘No Frontiers’ by Mary Black. These days the idea of sitting equidistant between 2 speakers (on stands of course) with gold plated plugs are behind me but the last time I can recall being really impressed by the pure sonics of an album was ‘Aerial’ by Kate Bush. I also agree that pretty much anything on the ECM label sounds, by default, fabulous.

  11. I remember testing three setups in a hifi shop: tranny Quads, followed by Croft pre and Bryston power, followed by Croft pre & Bill Beard power. I used Station to Station, particularly Golden Years – by the time we got to the all-valve set up, I could have mapped out the mix with a ruler & a pencil – a soundstage you could walk through and touch the players – amazing! The other test disc on that day was Weather Report ‘s Night Passage – the title track had reverb trail moving in different directions off the percussion – all perfectly “visible”…..these are now my standard test tracks, standard issue, no HD,……

  12. Great ideas here guys. Keep ’em coming. Chrisf is right too, it doesn’t have to be arty farty – “London Calling” is a fantastic sounding album. My current list:

    Tom Petty – Damn the torpedos – one of the great 70s rock albums
    Kind of blue – recent remaster, say no more
    Carole King – Tapestry – 24 bit gold remaster thingy bollocks – in my DNA
    Jackson Browne – Late for the sky – see Carole
    Steve Miller – Fly like an eagle – recent reissue/remaster
    Close to the edge – Yes – recent remaster blah blah
    Tull – Minstrel in the gallery Steven Wilson remix – they have never sounded better, though any of the reissues would do. Any stereo which can reproduce APP is doing well
    Sailing Shoes – Little Feat (even Lowell George thought my favourite, Dixie Chicken, doesn’t sound great)
    Little love letters – Carleen Carter – perfect pop country
    Wild Angels – Martina McBride – supposed to be perfect pop country, but something hairy and funky and mojo like got loose in the studio, and while I think some of the mix is odd…bits of really loud bass, for example, it had a real live band playing vibe. I love it.
    Aja – Steely Dan – obviously
    Neil Young – Ragged Glory – ragged being the operative word, but it rocks
    Uprising – Bob Marley – I know every note. Fabulous.

    The first JJ Cale album is a brilliant album but I only have the vinyl. Must get the CD. Probably need to add something acousticy..Will Akerman maybe.

  14. Larks Tongues’ in Aspic, track 1 side 1 scares the shit outta any Hi-Fi salesman and unsuspecting customers. Tried it for my last amp purchase and I’ve never seen a bloke fly across a shop to turn the volume down as fast in my life.

    • Certainly a great test of a system’s dynamic range. I’d also want to try it on the remastered Miles Davis/Gil Evans “Porgy and Bess”, for hearing how several different instruments playing together are rendered.

  15. Last set of new Speakers auditioned with The Who – Quadrophenia.
    My thinking was, if it can handle the bass on The Real Me, then it can handle just about anything I’m likely to play.

  17. Course the issue is shouldit be a fantastic sounding record or one that will lay the performance of the system out bare?

    If it is overly dense, too much going on I find it hard to discern.

    Hence uncluttered acoustic guitar/ lute – sparser classical is v good.

    Ditto piano and the human voice -thinking the Watersons, Unthanks and the like .

    Plus perhaps some electronica to test out Pencil’s spacious bottom end.

  20. I’ve been well served over the years by Steely Dan’s Gaucho, John Martyn’s Solid Air, and Paul Simon’s Graceland, particularly the choir pieces, which are beautifully , 3-dimensionally recorded. All on LP, although the Martyn CD is also excellent.

    Recent CD discoveries would be Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’, where the sonics have been well bothered with, and my trusty Holst/Karajan/Planets, which moves so much air, it literally pins you back in your seat.

    Good call above from Fitterstoke on Weather Report ‘s Night Passage and various ECM mentions. Now Ry Cooder’s Bop: it sounds fun but there’s always been something unnatural and gimmicky about it.

    • Was Bop….not touted as the first digital recording or something? Great album musically, but cold and brittle sound, even to the vinyl (which I bought at the time). As you say, Declan…..unnatural…….

      • Yes it was the first digital recording. Don’t remember it sounding bad, mind you I played it to death on cassette, recorded off vinyl. It’ll be interesting to see how it sounds. But Ry Cooder and David Lindley duetting in bottleneck and lap steel is never going to sound bad, is it?

          • A very fair one. No question, an excellent album (in fact, my most-played, along with Paris, Texas). Warner Bros. were obviously pushing the new technology on the not-too-mainstream Cooder release. I imagine we can agree that digital recording didn’t sound so “digital” after that. OOAA.

            • Interesting article written by Roger Nicholls, of Steely Dan fame, who knows a thing or two about audio.


              3M Digital Mastering System
              The Ry Cooder Bop Till You Drop album was the first digitally recorded pop album. It was recorded on the 3M 32-track digital recorder at Amigo studios in North Hollywood California. We booked the Village Recorder in 1981 to cut tracks for Nightfly and decided to try the 3M digital machine. We ran a Studer A-80 24-track analog machine in parallel with the 3M for the test. After the band laid down a take we performed an a-b-c listening test. The analog and digital machines were played back in sync while the band played along live. We could compare the analog machine, the digital machine, and the live band. The closest sound to the live band was the 3M digital machine. We re-aligned the Studer and gave it one more chance. The 3M was the clear winner. We rolled the Studer out into the street, (just kidding) and did the rest of the recording on the 3M 32-track machine. When it came time to mix, we mixed to the 3M 4-track machine.

              The 3M 32-track used 1” digital tape and the 4-track used 1/2” digital tape. They both ran at 45 ips. I guess 3M wanted to sell you lots of tape. The digital audio was recorded at 50kHz 16bits. There were no 16bit converters in 1981, so the 3M system used a 12 bit Burr-Brown converter and 4bits of an 8bit converter as gain-ranging to produce the 16bit results. The “brick wall” analog filters on the 3M machine hand-wound coils and took up most of a circuit board. They sounded good.
              The biggest drawback to the 3M system was the minimal error correction. After a couple of months working on the same piece of tape, the error count started to rise above the correctable level. There were adjustments on the front of the machine to fine tune the decoding of the data recorded on tape. You could adjust each track for the least amount of correctable errors and then transfer the tape digitally to another 3M machine. You now had a clean error-free tape to work on for a couple of months.

  21. Duco recommended Jon Thorne & Danny Thompson – Watching The Well for testing hi-fi. I’ve never tested hi-fi but it’s a fabulous album.

    For sonically beautiful albums, you can’t fault Blue Note, King Tubby or Massive Attack. I’d also consider Bryan Ferry’s Boys And Girls and 10cc’s How Dare You?

  22. I suspect fabulous sounding albums sound fabulous on everything. What you want is dense, complex albums which sound defined and great on a good stereo, and muddy and a mess on a bad one. If such albums exist.

  23. Re Twangs comment somewhere *points* up there.

    If you like the music too much you,can just get into the music too much, spend your time fighting the need to skin up or reach for a bottle.

  25. A vote for Eureka by The Bible. One of my fave albums, produced by dragon-chasing Steve Earle. Only the late 80’s keyboard sounds on a few tracks let it down, and then not by much.

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