For great rock and jazz instrumentals with glaringly great drums I’d go with a couple recordings.
1)LTE— Liquid Trio Experiment. (Portnoy, levin and Rudess bring it. )
I’m listening to the new LTE (3) right now. Love these guys!
Nuance! (Love the name dude. )
LTE are absolute fire! I preordered LTE 3 with the 5.1 mix. Should get it any day now. Enjoy man. Terrific headphone listen. I love the Trio Experiment. My favourite so far. Check out Portnoy’s drumming on HOTROD. 
Qobuz playlist - reference tracks
I made a shorter version for a friend using Tidal:
Test Tracks on TIDAL
Yeah lots of BOWIE there. He really does have a ton of incredible fidelity recordings. I bought the “Loving The Alien “ 11cd boxset and that I have to say is crazy good.
The Jeff Buckley is a good one. Not a huge fan of his, but I’m a huge fan of Andy Wallace who mixed that album incredibly.
Some good choices for sure.
Recently, in the What are you Listening to This Week, I pointed out Jean-Michel Jarre’s latest binaural recording, AMAZÖNIA. I don’t think it can be a test track, but I’m not sure. It is an immersive experience. Was just released April 7th. Soundtrack to a photographic exhibition of the Amazon opening in Paris next month.
I listened on the iPhone and the Audeze LCDi3 with Cipher cable. This week I will use the Hive estats Bifrost 3 and STAX amp.
I’m sort of overwhelmed by this work. Would value thoughts on if it can be a headphone evaluation. Sound is natural, electronic, and processed natural.
I haven’t updated much on my test list since my last post. I have added a couple of tracks but the main thing is I have tried to make it easier to reference for those who read/watch my reviews.
Rather than copy and pasting it here, I am going to be lazy and just spam the link to my test list:
Your Spotify link seems to be broken or it has some issue SenyorC. Nevermind, I reload it the page and now it shows fine the Spotify link, FALSE alarm.
@pennstac -to me if it’s a track you get to know well, it can be a test track.
I would say for me, my test tracks are a decent variety of what I listen to often or tracks that might be mastered a little too hot or too bassy.
Adelle - Skyfall
Aimer - Brave Shine
Cynic - True Hallucination Speak
Daft Punk - Doin’ It Right
Diverse System - Bomba
Genki Rockets - Crystal Fall
Keiichi Okabe - Amusement Park
Seatbelts - Tank
Snarky Puppy - Tarova
Steely Dan - Babylon Sisters
The Ocean - Firmament
Yes - Roundabout
And if its worse case scenario I can always take out and play a Hotel California!
Go on, you know you want to.
Qobuz has a 92 track playlist “Ultimate System Testers”. Some of these tracks are quite spectacular.
A different question - how do you jump to the last post? It takes forever to get there via manual scrolling.
There are some big band 70s jazz albums I use to make sure a system can be bright.
The recordings are bright. The horns are bright. If it doesn’t play bright to
unlistenable, the gear ain’t doin its job.
On most systems, there is a hard-to-grab, poorly implemented, barely visible, light blue slightly fatter slider to the right of your posts. It will have a date at the top (Like May 2018) and a time stamp (40 min ago) at the bottom of the thin blue line on which the slider rests. Simply try and slide the slider to the bottom to skip to the last post.
Any sane interface designer would have come up with a better method. perhaps pressing control, alt, and delete at the same time, for example.
A quick method, if you have a keyboard. is to just use the Home/End keys to jump to the first/last post.
On mobile, I think it’s fastest to click the timstamp(s) at the top and bottom of the scroll bar to do the same (no need to scroll anything):
Darn, you ruined a good rant. I like to complain about poor (usually international) interface design. Sliders, when they exist, should be obvious, contrasty, and easy to use.
Well that is a surprise, it works. Why in the world did they implement a method that no one else uses? Very poor design. Not at all intuitive. There should be a “jump to page” option. You can actually do that if you modify the URL in the header:
…headphone-evaluation-test-tracks/348/316
The page number is the last number. Change it to whatever page you want to see.
Other than every word-processor, ever, since like WordStar 1.0 …
Hey friends,
Some of you have been requesting some of my test tracks for evaluating gear. In order to keep things simple as well as allow me to add more playlists, I decided to create a dedicated page for it. I will continue to update it as I have more time. Cheers.
