Back before the Internet killed retail, Tower Records (the best recorded music chain in my area) had a special classical room and a general “all other” room. The classical clientele were a wildly different crowd.
My concerns for this forum include:
(1) Not enough “new music” participants here to cover all the genres, and there are plenty of competing websites. This place is primarily for headphones, and doesn’t have that many users yet.
(2) For me, Songs to Test Headphones is explicitly NOT about my musical tastes and has semi-objective criteria. I use a selection of tracks to pick-up on reproduction issues and tonal quality. I don’t particularly like some of the tracks I use for testing and some had poor mastering, but I know that they reveal flaws well. [E.g., The thin, bright, buzzy, warehouse-sounding, cheap equipment early albums from The Replacements. Bad headphones = screeching sounds. Or, Suzanne Vega’s “Woman on a Tier” can have an odd instant-headache effect due to the use of trash cans for percussion.]
What I look for includes: (a) bass extension and clarity, (b) high-end harshness, © how distortion is handled, (d) ability to reveal subtle sounds, to include room echoes, string noise, and breath, (e) ability to handle extremely complex passages, (f) stereo channel separation, (g) dynamic range vs. compression, (h) overall warmth vs. brightness, etc.
So, to this end I’d probably move toward editing and curating the suggested test tracks so they can serve general testing and cover the bases quickly. We might propose and discuss specific tracks for specific quality/neutrality tests and separately for listening goals.
I don’t spend most of my time testing; it’s mainly for reviews and purchasing. Of course, you do want a pleasant selection of songs if you test the same headphones with half a dozen amps and another half dozen DACs.
