Great disc for auditioning

[bonzo75]

Heard this at Joel's place yesterday, where we ABed the Ypsilon hybrids and Luxman M800 bridged pair of stereo amps on Vivid Giya G1 (more on the amps and rest of the demo later).

This is a great disc for testing gear as the first track is nice baritone vocals, the second is an overture that is pretty dynamic, and the third is a choral.

 

[aln]

I don't see the image. Can you post the name?
Thanks

 

[bonzo75]

Search on "mendelssohn elijah 1846 mccreesh nfm" on amazon

 

[treitz3]

Hello, aln. Whenever an image is too big for the screen, you can always right click the mouse when over the image and hit "view image". It will resize the image to fit your screen and you will be able to view it in full.

Tom

 

[Cascais]

I take this as a great disc for auditioning a new piece of equipment in a system. My method is to take a familiar piece of music with lots of tone colors and instrumentation, or which has one identifiable sound that can be heard clearly and varies depending on what speaker or other component is being auditioned. My long-time favorite is a piece of ear candy from Diana Krall's disc When I look in your eyes, the first cut "Let's Face the Music and Dance." It begins with solo guitar, then develops with full orchestra, very well recorded with Krall's voice smooth as butterscotch and a Latin beat with percussion. In the first few bars there is a bassoon which is a clue to detail and near the end the bassoon underlies the score, barely audible. Those are clues which indicate how well a new component is doing compared to the usual setup. There are others, but Diana works for me, I wish.

 

[bonzo75]

I meant this is a great disc where track 1, 2, and 3 cover baritone vocals, orchestra dynamics, and chorals, covering most of what I personally like to test. The differences while ABing stand out easily

 

[amirm]

Thanks a bunch Bonzo. Took some trying but I found the link on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mendelssohn-...1&keywords=Mendelssohn:+Elijah,+1846+mccreesh

Now the task is finding a cheaper price .

Thanks again. I previewed track 3 and my laptop speakers almost blew up into my face .

 

[amirm]

Bingo! Pono has it for nearly one third the price of the CD on Amazon: https://www.ponomusic.com/ccrz__CCP...&artistId=of:2ae7c6dfefef45ebba89fd60699e11c8

Just $10.29. It is in my cart now. I am a happy man.

 

[Argonaut]

An excellent recommendation Cascais, this should also give a system a challenging workout, especially tracks like Mummers Dance which can go all to hell if a system chokes and falls to bits!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ql4za30ZfUk

 

[amirm]

An excellent recommendation Cascais, this should also give a system a challenging workout, especially tracks like Mummers Dance which can go all to hell if a system chokes and falls to bits!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ql4za30ZfUk

Looks like UMG has done a great job of cleansing Youtube of her tracks for us in US. Here is her own web site though:

http://loreenamckennitt.com/album/nights-alhambra/

I have three of her albums and previewing to see if I should get this. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[amirm]

THe three disc package (2 CDs and one DVD) is $24 from third parties (and $47 from Amazon): http://www.amazon.com/Nights-From-The-Alhambra-Combo/dp/B006ZZANFG/ref=ntt_mus_ep_dpi_5

Thinking of skipping the DVD and buying the download for $17 from Pono: https://www.ponomusic.com/ccrz__CCP...&artistId=of:13abd8001a064ff6b05ed8bbc166a9a8

 

[Joel]

I am not very found of test discs.
This one of course is rather challenging. But beyond technical features, the artistic performance is outstanding...

 

[bonzo75]

How about nailing down five reference recordings ( music albums) that we all buy and familiarise ourselves with. Then we would have a better if not perfect shared reference when talking about gear. I know there are other factors but at least this one we can control to a useful degree.

Yes but then we need to share a similar taste in music. For example, some people use electronica to audition bass.

The objective of my post on this thread though was that this one disc is good because it saves swapping between discs, where one disc might have vocals, another choral, and a third the dynamics from 50 acoustical instruments. And all three tracks one after the other too, so you don't even have to Skip between tracks