I’m current trying to find songs to expand my playlist that is designed for demoing different aspects of my speakers or my headphones to people, I current have a small playlist already forming but if anyone would want to send me recommendations I would love to pick them up.
Headphones- Hermonic Dyn Zeus, Focal elegia, 6xx, and soon the
kph40
IEMs- BLON-5 and BLON-3
Speakers- Adam T5V, minirig 3, and mini rig 2 mini
All of these products except for that of the minirigs are also being powered on the ifi Zen Dac, and my current playlist of what I have is at the bottom of this post.
Depending on what kind of genres there are a few I’d recommend:
Classical/Jazz:
Hans Zimmer - Mountains
Claude Debussy - Reflets dans l’eau
Maurice Ravel - Bolero
Melanie De Biasio - Blackened Cities
Electronic:
M83 - Midnight City
Justice - Genesis
Daft Punk - Digital Love
No Mana - Secret Level
Indie/Rock/Metal:
Gordian Knot - Rivers Dancing
Nile - The Inevitable Degradation of Flesh
Septicflesh - Prometheus
Men I Trust - Sugar
Red House Painters - Song for a Blue Guitar
Phil Colins - Colours
Peter Gabriel - Big Time
Some personal favorite songs with some ways of exposing certain things I am looking for when picking headphones.
This is a playlist from a Spanish reviewer (from Audio46 Spanish YouTube channel). The first five songs for for bass, five more for mids, five for treble, then five for technicalities, like soundstage, image, detail, and so on, five more songs for dynamics (the OSTs) and it ends with a mix of five different songs that are just a mix of everything, like bohemian rhapsody and so on.
It’s a very interesting playlist for testing gear.
Then there’s this one, very popular in Spotify. It’s very mixed, but I have found very good music to start to follow a path of artists that value good sound quality.
Len - Steal My Sunshine has a low tone that I think is an error, sort of a repeating “fwaaaa” that I like to see how IEMs respond to. Some take it pretty well and maintain separation from the other effects, others get tripped up by it and it smears the track.
Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine is fun for speakers, there is a backup vocal coming in around 1:00 that speakers can throw between your ears while the rest of the mix plays in front as normal. The effect is reduced or lost with headphones and IEMs.
BT - The Force of Gravity is another good effects experience, but kind of a long song. After the five minute mark there’s a build up where he tilts the mix in a fun way.
Gorillaz - Strange Timez can summon up some nice soundstage bits.
