Good Music for testing Audio Equipment

[Kefas]

This looks promising;

 

[izeek]

absolute test of your speakers bass ability while having air spaces between some of the passages.

 

[Migo]

There is also this video with a complete take. It sounds very promising.

 

[stehno]

Beautiful sax about the halfway point.

 

[24bit]

I have become almost addicted to especially the Sound Liaison One Mic Recordings but the OneMic minimalist recordings being a fine runner up.
The first One Mic I know of is the Cowboy Junkies recorded back in1987 , new recordings are all more recent but what happend in between, any one mics from the '90 or '10?

 

[24bit]

This is a great album. Superb one mic. The most intimate yet of all the one mic albums.
Amulet download

The album just won the album of the year award. Well deserved. There is hope for the future of recording technology when such a back to the roots' album can get first price.

 

[stehno]

Very nice compilation .
Thanks for posting!
A lot of the music from that period really holds up well. Compared to the stuff from the '80 it's hard to believe that there is a 20 year difference as those albums sounds so much better.

Oh I dunno about that. The 80's had some pretty phenomenal music IMO and much of it seemed well-enough-engineered. Perhaps not this piece but there was a lot of fun music in the 80's - including this piece.

 

[Ron Resnick]

This is one of my favorite songs from the 1980s. But it would not occur to me to use it for testing audio equipment.

 

[24bit]

Bought the 24bit hi-res download at the SOUND LIAISON WEBSITE I think the Flac at the CARMEN GOMES BAND CAMP WEBSITE is 16bit just like the CD or ? But anyhow it's a superb album. And it is so much more than a tribute album. They really make the songs their own. A blues album with an ECM vibe. Well done! and that low 27hz A note from the bass in the beginning...whew...makes my .......rattle

Superb review of the album in Positive Feedback Creative Forum for the Audio Arts;

With this completely unexpected treatment of the great Robert Johnson's songs, Carmen Gomes Inc. surprises and delights me. I was expecting blues, of course, but the band's interpretations are a unique fusing of blues, bebop and contemporary rhythms. A refreshing new look based more around the lyrics and the mood of the songs.




Carmen Gomez Inc, Up Jumped the Devil. Sound Liaison. 2021 (DXD) HERE

If you're expecting something traditional, you're going to be surprised. These are not the acoustic blues we hear from Johnson's own recordings, nor the electric renditions of Eric Clapton. These are a unique treatment bringing the combined talents of the band members in a sometimes dreamy, frequently atmospheric, always sultry blend of voice, guitar, bass, and percussion. Peter Bjørnild, bassist, arranger and producer, writes, "More than playing parts, guitarist Folker Tettero and drummer Bert Kamsteeg are playing moods. I actually asked Bert to play the lyrics instead of the drums... Throughout the album Folker is in constant dialogue with Carmen's melody line, sometimes edging her on and at other times comforting her. Folker decided to use an electric 12 string guitar on the small miniatures."

Each of the Robert Johnson songs are framed by with small instrumental miniatures written by Bjørnild and Gomes. They add tremendously to the overall effect of a "frame story" where each song is a picture set within the larger overall frame of the album: "Robert walking late at night, en route in the Mississippi Delta, reflecting back on his life."



Blues legend Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) made some landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937. These recordings are available in various reissues, including most notably the 1961 compilation released on Columbia Records, "King of the Delta Blues Singers."



But just to be clear: this new album from Carmen Gomes Inc. is not pure unalloyed Robert Johnson. It is a fresh imagining, in contemporary musical language, of the feelings and mood of those originals. And, as this, it works supremely well.



This is another exceptional recording from Sound Liaison's recording engineer Frans de Rond.

Gomes' sultry voice is captured beautifully—clear, present, rich—with a "reach out and touch" immediacy. De Rond starts with his typical set up for his One Mic recordings, a main central Josephson C700S stereo microphone to capture the overall sound of the band. Then he adds just a bit here and a bit there: a support microphone on Gomes, a support microphone on Bjørnild's double-bass, a spaced pair of ambient microphones.

The magic, though, is in the delicate combining of these into a very coherent whole. The sound stage is stable, three-dimensional, magically immediate. De Rond is simply a master.

Recommended.

 

[APP]

Oh I dunno about that. The 80's had some pretty phenomenal music IMO and much of it seemed well-enough-engineered. Perhaps not this piece but there was a lot of fun music in the 80's - including this piece.

Yes you are right. I guess I was thinking more about straight ahead jazz recordings.

 

[Kefas]

If anyone wants to test if their DAC can handle 764kHz then there is one song from the new
Carmen Gomes album Ray! available as a free test song in that extreme sample rate.

 

[24bit]

I must say that I am enjoying this release tremendously.

From the newsletter it is clear that engineer Frans de Rond had good time recording in that acoustic space:

“Listen how well the sound in this little wooden church, with its gorgeous warm lush natural decay, helps bring out the piano’s wonderful clarity and timbre.
The Straight Strung Concert Grand’s perfect placement of the lowest note completely to the left and the highest note completely to the right is a sound engineer's dream come true.“ Frans de Rond time-for-ballads-rob-van-bavel

 

[stehno]

Shouldn't this be on most everybody's short list?

 

[Kefas]

Shouldn't this be on most everybody's short list?

Very well recorded indeed.

 

[Kefas]

I must say that I am enjoying this release tremendously.

From the newsletter it is clear that engineer Frans de Rond had good time recording in that acoustic space:

That is maybe the best ballad jazz trio recording I have ever heard. That piano sounds incredible.

 

[stehno]

I think some of the better recordings are bass-oriented tracks for evaluating a playback system. Primarily because the bass really is the foundation and depending on how well-tuned the system is, will have a signifianct impact not just in the bass regions but across the entire frequency spectrum and presentation.

But of course, only if you crank up the volume.

 

[24bit]

Indeed a well recorded and well balanced bass is everything.

 

[daytona600]

 

[APP]

If anyone wants to test if their DAC can handle 764kHz then there is one song from the new
Carmen Gomes album Ray! available as a free test song in that extreme sample rate.

The RedBook CD sounds pretty good too Ray! Limited Edition Compact Disc.

 

[24bit]

This is one of my favorite songs from the 1980s. But it would not occur to me to use it for testing audio equipment.

Hi Ron, what is an example of a track that you use for that purpose? Or just the one song you put on after adding or tweaking something. With your great audio experience, I'd be most curious to know. (And Thanks once again for the great job you do with this forum.)