Okay everbody, I plan on doing some add ons to my car's audio system. As of right now I love listening to DJ Quick: Sexuality, Metallica: One and Ride the Lightning and house music: any kick ass DJ, and I love how these sound on the stock system, but I want more (us humans always wanting more). I'm wondering those of you who have system upgrades and hey even those who don't, what do you like listening to that sounds really good? But, those who do have system upgrades what song or songs did you use to test your sound system?

 

I play "Paradise city" by GNR. Works pretty well with the Kicker sub. The rest of the system is stock, so the bass gets outta control depending on the genre of music being played. I can only play rock at peak volume w/o getting distortion.

 

Eagles - Hotel California (Live)...From the Hell Freezes Over Album. Awesome song and when the bass hits hard after the introductory solo.

 

one of my all time fave test discs is madonna, the immaculate collection. also, spies...music of espionage..classic all digital recordings which sound just awesome.

 

Sweet thanks everyone for the feedback.... keep them coming folks...

 

^^ I'm an Eagles fan so I'll agree here.

First, you want to use whatever music you are familiar with. The more you know the music the more you know what it "should" sound like.

Having said that, I look for tight quick clean bass. I don't like it reverberating, or sounding muddy. I want to feel it in my chest cavity but not necessarily rattling my windowns. Pick a song with nice deep lows. INXS's "Not Enough Time" or Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain" come to mind. For mids I try to find unique sounding voices (Don Henley, Linda Elder) to see how well they are reproduced. I also like the Eagles "Seven Bridges Road" where they sing acapella (sp?). If you can clearly differenciate between the several voices in acapella then you're getting pretty good sound resolution. For the highs I want to hear them crisp without them being harsh. The opening sequence of Pink Floyd's "Time" (Dark Side of teh Moon) has various clocks chiming across the entire soundstage. Listen to the detail and for the spacing of the clocks.

My last recommendation would be to pick an artist that is known for putting out well engineered products. The Eagles are known for being perfectionists in both live and recorded venues. Their "Long Road Out Of Eden" is an excellent technical recording, all the instruments and voices are very well balanced (to my ears). A nice system can definitely take advantage of that and show it to its best capability.

 

Totally agree on the Eagles... Probably the best technical recordings out there.

Lisa Loeb: Firecracker is another great one. Motley Crue: Dr. Feelgood (album) has some good crunchy stuff. Josh Groban and LeAnn Rymes for vocal performances.

 

Dire Straits: Down to the Waterline (Sultans of swing album)
Pink Floyd: The Wall
many Classical recordings with a full orchestra

These recordings are revealing for audio systems.

 

Eagles, Hell Freeze Over- ^^this seems to be the popular benchmark for acoustic recordings for the last 10 years. I can't disagree. I used it to assess my home theater system too. The TSX doesn't sound so good. The bass is way muddy.

Norah Jones, first album- delicate sounds, her smokey female vocals. Brilliant for detecting subtleties of your system. Great with speakers with wooden cabinets- the warmth of her voice, guitar, other woodwind type instruments really sound natural and warm. The tsx comes off a bit bright for my tastes, but at least it helped me be realistic about my treble.

John Williams, Greatest Hits 1969-1999- Wide dynamic range, re-recorded and remastered. The fireworks of the Olympic theme, the grand epic of the Star Wars Trilogy, the intrepid sounding Indiana Jones theme, the solemnity of the Saving Private Ryan theme. Only downfall....Superman theme was the original analog recording. Most of the songs tend to be too big for the stock TSX system.

The stock TSX system, while good on the surface, started to lose its credibility with me when I started playing these. Still a HUGE upgrade from my integra, but I will upgrade my speakers at some point. I can't stand to listen to it so much, I mainly listen to talk radio on AM now.

 

Young Jeezy - Late night tip

great track to play while turning your subwoofer amp

 

i'm not even an eagles fan, but when i sold cadillacs we used a true digital/surround sound version of that song to demonstrate the cts's bose system ... OFF THE CHARTS

 

I used JayZ brush you shoulders off when i first got my alpine R subwoofer.

 

Completely forgot about Dire Straits, I used that very song to audition my home system.

 

Good song for testing (and listening), right? Guess it takes another member of the over 40 crowd to remember. Rock on, dude!

Hopefully everyone evaluating the TSX audio system isn't using MP3 files. Use a CD for a meaningful test. MP3 compression is shite!

 

For those of you with interest in "indie rock", the new Band of Horses album "Cease to Begin" is a brilliantly engineered disc. It's also a fantastic album.

 

Weekapaug Groove from the 6th disc of Hampton Comes Alive.

 

Anything from Nine Inch Nails from the Downward Spiral album onward. Trent Reznor is beyond obsessive in the engineering department. The With Teeth album is even a regular CD on one side and HDA DVD on the other. It sounds pretty damn awesome on my THX system at home.

Any well recorded full orchestral piece is going to be a very good test due to the gigantic range and polyphony involved.

Also, all the poppy garbage barfed out by the big labels these days is pretty well engineered though it's always compressed as hell. Plus you have to listen to it.

 

Yes Nin.....

 

Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up.

 

Nine Inch Nails is one we brought with us when we were test driving to test out the stereos-- though it was the older Pretty Hate Machine (my personal fav). Gotta have that original CD, though, in order to test out the full range-- you lose too much if you rip it. A selection of Depeche Mode is good too as you get some really well mixed bass.

 

Robert Plant - Ship of Fools (Now and Zen album). The first 90 seconds are an awessome speaker test.

 

camron - killa cam

 

seal - amazing (thin white duke dub mix)

 

if you really want to test the lows i would highly suggest playing 2pac's "Ambition Az A Ridah" 1st track off All Eyez on Me ...disc 1 of course.

 

to test a sound system I usually use fast paced techno. something like sandstorm or similar. that way it has highs and lows and its great for tuning a system. the one techno song from the one matrix movie I cant remember the name of it is actually the primary one I uses when tuning a system.

 

Dave Matthews Band - anything from Crash (the intro to Say Goodbye is great or listening to the drums in Drive In Drive Out) or Under the Table and Dreaming (Ants Marching is a good one).
Radiohead's Kid A is another one I like (the actual song Kid A)
Oh, and Stevie Ray Vaughn playing Little Wing is always a good one.

 

Some of the car audio companies, namely Eclipse and Focal, give away compliation CDs that are really well engineered and are good for testing systems. Lots of different music genres on one disc.

I will differ with others and say there isn't one band or one album that is perfect for testing. Test with songs you are familiar with, so you can hear the nuances of the systems.

Having said that, there are two types of music that are generally good for testing:

- female jazz vocals (Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Patricia Barber, Cassandra Wilson for some modern examples). The vocals really test the midrange of a system.

- music with a lot of saxophone. I read somewhere that they produce a lot of harmonics (I think more than any other instrument). These are notoriously hard to reproduce accurately in sound systems.

Finally, Stereophile Magazine and others produce "system test discs" for CD-based home audio systems. They include a lot of valuable tests, including frequency test tones (to test how low and high your system can go, eg, from 40Hz up to 20kHz), channel ID, channel phasing, a "clap" track, and harmonic distortion.

 

Make sure what you play has a high bitrate, and for songs, I'd recommend Granite by Pendulum or All Mixed Up by 311. The second one's got a great mix of crisp hi-hat playing and good bass