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Also, son David’s ukulele is a mellow-sounding, koa-bodied, nylon-string instrument, and if it sounds bright like a steel-string instrument, something’s amiss in your system. His rich baritone and the detuned low strings of his slack-key guitar fall right into the frequencies where a subwoofer crossover usually operates lots of systems make his voice sound bloated and the guitar sound boomy. But mostly, I just listen for how the tune grooves.ĭennis and David Kamakahi, “Ulili’E” (from Ohana):ĭennis Kamakahi is the Johnny Hartman of Hawaii. It’s packed with hard-to-reproduce stuff: Fagen’s reedy voice, a perfectly plucked bass line, a piano that sounds hard and cheap through many speakers, lush background vocals, and a big-sounding tenor sax solo from Wayne Shorter. Steely Dan, “Aja” (from Aja): This is my reference when I want to hear what “regular music” sounds like through an audio product. If it doesn’t sound like that, something’s wrong somewhere, possibly in the speaker’s crossover. Not smooth, not real coarse, just a little coarse. Ron Sexsmith, “Words We Never Use” (from Ron Sexsmith): Sexsmith’s voice is supposed to sound just a little coarse. Also, once the tune gets going, two deep bass notes appear some speakers and subs can’t reproduce the deepest one. A super-high-pitched chime, struck right after Cole sings the line “…never, never, never ring a bell” lets me judge a tweeter’s high-frequency extension.īebel Gilberto, “Aganj ú” (from Bebel Gilberto): Gilberto’s voice on this tune can sound edgy through some speakers. I use the percussion to judge soundstage width. The deep bass notes that start the tune let me judge a product’s bass output as well as the quality (tight, loose, etc.) of the bass. Holly Cole, “Train Song” (from Temptation): This has been my #1 demo track since it was released in 1995.
If you have any favorite demo tunes of your own, let us know in the Comments section below. You can use these if you like, but it’s even better if you use tunes that you’ve already heard on lots of systems.
Just to give you an idea of the kinds of things you might want to put on your personal demo CD, here’s a list of some key tunes currently on my disc, and what I listen for in each tune.
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My website has some you can download for free. You might also want to add a few test tones, such as pink noise. With the mini demo CD, I can do a basic sound quality evaluation in about 6 minutes. You can do this with the free Audacity editing software, too. I even created a “mini” version of my demo CD by editing the tunes in Sony SoundForge to keep only the best parts.
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You should also rip the tunes in, say, 256 kbps MP3, and put them on your smartphone or MP3 player so you have a portable test rig. The important thing is to rip the tunes in WAV or in a lossless format, so you get a bit-for-bit copy of what’s on the CD.
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I’ve done it in iTunes and in Windows Media Player with similarly good results. You can put together your own demo CD using practically any computer with a CD-R drive and any music management software. Again, the choice of tunes isn’t as important as your familiarity with those tunes. You don’t want your selection to evolve too much, though. I choose them not because they sound great, but because they quickly reveal the flaws in an audio system. Since I compiled my first demo CD back in 1994 or so, my choice of tunes has evolved as I’ve found more revealing material, or as my equipment testing needs have changed. You’ll be able to determine if a headphone has a soft-sounding tonal balance, or if a speaker’s tweeter has an emphasized, edgy top octave. When you’ve heard, say, Stewart Copeland’s high-pitched splash cymbal on The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” through a few dozen systems, you’ll have a good idea of what that cymbal’s supposed to sound like. That’s because the value of a demo CD lies not so much in which tunes you choose to put on it, but how many systems you’re played the demo CD through. And the more I use it, the more valuable it becomes. With my demo CD, I can tell in a few minutes how accurate voices sound through a speaker, how natural a headphone’s tonal balance is, and how much output a subwoofer delivers at the deepest bass frequencies. But when I want to find out what an audio product does - i.e., how a listener will perceive its sound - the demo CD is a much better tool. Test gear is great for telling me how well an audio product is engineered. If I were forced to choose between the $20K worth of audio test gear I own or the demo CD that cost me probably 20 cents to make, I’d take the latter without hesitation.