Making the correct speaker selections might be challenging. It can be difficult to choose the perfect speaker for you with so many various kinds of speakers available. It’s crucial to test your speakers to make sure they’re operating at their peak whether you’re an audiophile or just searching for a nice listening experience. Playing music that is intended to strain your speakers to the utmost is one approach to achieve this. Hence this article about the best songs to test your speakers.
Depending on your unique musical preferences and the kind of speakers you have, different songs will work best for testing your speakers. However, there are some songs that are widely acknowledged as excellent gauges of speaker performance. These songs were created with excellent sound engineering and feature a wide spectrum of frequencies, from deep bass to high treble.
It’s crucial to play music with a range of instruments and vocalists while testing your speakers. This will assist you in locating any speaker problems, such as distortion or unbalanced sound. Additionally, you ought to play music with a wide dynamic range—that is, music that quickly transitions from quiet to loud.This will put the speakers’ tolerance for abrupt volume changes to the test.
Playing music that was recorded at a high bitrate is also essential. The number of bits used to represent one second of audio is referred to as the bitrate. Sound quality improves with greater bitrates. Low bitrate recordings of music could sound compressed and lack detail.
We’ll look at some of the top tracks to test your speakers in this article. We’ll talk about the many genres of music that work best for speaker testing as well as the particular songs that work well for evaluating various elements of speaker performance. This article will provide you all the information you need to have the finest listening experience possible.
12 Best Songs To Test Speakers – Here are our recommendations!
12: Letters – Yosi Horikawa
Yosi Horikawa’s discography should unquestionably be at your disposal if you wish to use a complex mix to test the organisation of your system. Even in a time when experimentalism in music is at its height, the Japanese producer’s soundscapes on his Wandering EP (on which Letters appears) beg to be seen as an enlivening original.
Horikawa is all about showcasing how sounds – both mundane and obscure – can most interestingly and mesmerizingly work together in a space, fusing everyday sounds (such as pencil-to-paper scrawling and birds chirping) with the more abstract (ping-pong-like electronica). Your speakers and system as a whole have the responsibility of enabling his imaginative manipulation to make sense.
11: Blinding Lights – The Weeknd
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, a Canadian singer-songwriter best known by his stage name The Weeknd, spoke on his collaboration with Swedish producer Max Martin in a 2020 interview with Variety magazine. He said: “Max and I have become literally the best of friends, but I don’t do that with many people. It’s not that I can’t, but a collaboration is a relationship, it’s like a marriage, you’ve gotta build up to it”.
This producer was a wise choice to become friends with, being the producer of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”, the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” and NSYNC’s “I’m Gonna Be Me” (all of which were released in the three years from 1998 to 2000).
Here, The Weeknd’s vocal range spans from the succulent low register of F3 scaling all the way up to a high note of C5, and the synth-heavy production is yet another masterpiece from Max Martin, though it sounds more like it was inspired by the 1980s than the 1990s. Is the opening drum riff an exact copy of Thriller by Michael Jackson? Check the opinions of your speakers.
10: Rhapsody In Blue – George Gershwin
A vital loudspeaker skill is the capacity to go from “very quiet” to “very loud indeed”, whether it be a voice, a single instrument, or a massive symphony orchestra in full assault mode. Few musical compositions are as effective at illustrating the dynamic power of an orchestra as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
Within the first two minutes, it switches multiple times from a sombre piano to a string, brass, and percussion overload, and back again. Each time, your speakers must make the switch instantly and without showing any signs of undue strain. which is more difficult than you might imagine.
9: Montagues And Capulets – Sergei Prokofiev
Evidently, the devil is in the details because that is where true musical enjoyment lies. Additionally, there are numerous opportunities for your speakers to demonstrate their nuance-picking abilities in a large-scale symphonic set-piece like this.
Tiny details like these are what give a piece of music its true life, such as the sound of a flute player’s embouchure, the rattle of a snare beneath a drum skin, the blare of a trumpet as it sounds the charge, and even the squeak of a timpani foot-pedal. Are the tiny inputs of the triangle in the backdrop of this composition audible through your speakers? No? Try out some new ones after listing them on eBay.
8: Pretty Vacant – Sex Pistols
Despite being viewed as a threat to British civilization at the time, forty years later the Sex Pistols sound like absolutely no threat at all. However, they do have a fantastic production quality.
Chris Thomas’s production of Pretty Vacant is nothing short of astounding considering the little resources he had to work with (a vocal that, while captivating, is hardly a melodic paradigm, and rather basic guitar, bass, and drums). It rigorously tests your speakers’ capacity to create a coherent whole-stage image because it is full and widescreen and makes the shape and layout of the drum kit completely explicit.
7: Uh Uh – Thundercat
Massive show-off Thundercat (Stephen Bruner) released Drunk, one of the year’s most well-received albums. And he plays with such frenzied virtuosity on Uh Uh (a brief but exhaustive exploration of the six-string electric bass guitar) that your speakers have nowhere to hide.
The kind of testing that speaker engineers fear is done on bass extension, speed, tone diversity, attack, and decay. Here, a clearly defined and well-described variation in note intensity is needed. It’s a really athletic piece of playing in the proper hands, but in the hands of a less skilled player, it’s merely a low-frequency jumble of overlapping information.
6: Das Spiegel – The Chemical Brothers
You won’t find a more stop-start, condensed, and overall compressed collection of electronically produced sounds, thus Das Spiegel is an excellent test of your speakers’ control over attack and decay. Every sound on this album, with the exception of the rhythm guitar’s strumming and the melodica’s blowing, seems to have been created to arrive out of nowhere and stop abruptly.
Control must be martial, from the percussion pattern’s four-square boom-bap to the squeals, hisses, and squeaks in the background as the song builds. The virtually continuous bass tones that are thrumming simply add to the challenge.
5: Baby Plays Around – Anne Sofie Von Otter
The 2001 album ‘For the Stars’ by Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello is a ruthless test of your speakers’ midrange communication abilities.
This open, expansive, and relentlessly hi-fi recording is not only filled with minute details of von Otter’s phrasing and the sounds made by her tongue, teeth, and palate, but it also discloses some of the techniques she uses to control her breath. Although it’s a hi-fi cliche, it applies here: if your speakers are good, it will sound like she’s in the room with you, singing with equal parts emotion and control.
4: Spoon – Can
This song is a very thorough test of your speakers’ capacity to combine a fiendishly off-kilter and varied collection of instrumental threads into a clear and unified whole. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit creates an irregular, intricate cage for his bandmates to work within.
The characteristic dangerous fills and pads that Liebezeit unleashes at around 2:23 are difficult enough for your speakers to control rhythmically on their own. But in addition to the muddled vocal inputs Damo Suzuki makes in his second language, there are also gurgling bass phrases, guitar picking, and keyboard outbursts.
3: Lonesome Lover – Max Roach And Abbey Lincoln
This ensemble is led by jazz stunt drummer Roach, whose flawless hi-hat and ride cymbal performance is a good test of treble quality in and of itself. But the weeping, keening, and harsh playing of saxophonist Clifford Jordan is what really sets out the high-frequency men from the boys.
His shrieks and flurry of notes in the higher register must shine, but not to the point of jarring sharpness. He puts your tweeters’ ability to regulate a note while keeping its roughness and ferocity to the test from 3:00 to 3:12. At 4:38 and again starting at 6:04, singer Abbey Lincoln and the chorus add their own high-frequency fidelity analysis.
2: Radiohead – The National Anthem
The National Anthem is a complex, multi-tiered wedding cake of a tune, as is typical of Radiohead, with acoustic and electronic instruments blasting out in all directions – not to mention a brass band that seems to have shown up to the wrong booking. The vocal treatment by Thom Yorke, the bass guitar sound that is overdriven, and the theremin-like wailing in the background are all turned up to eleven.
Throughout the entire frequency range, your speakers must strike the ideal balance between organisation and attack, dynamism and poise, and, most importantly, control and abandonment. If done well, this creates an exciting cacophony. When done poorly, it just sounds chaotic.
1: Turn Your Lights Down Low – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Reggae is largely credited to Bob Marley in terms of introducing it to a global audience, but Island Records’s insistence on a high-gloss hi-fi sound made the customarily gritty genre more approachable. This is brilliantly illustrated by Turn Your Lights Down Low since it is such a roomy recording and each instrument is secure in its own part of the soundscape.
If the low-heat simmer and intensity of the song are to really impact, your speakers must depict each player’s position on the stage and, most importantly, the space between them. This song is one of the few that uses space as an instrument so well.
12 Best Songs To Test Speakers – Closing remarks and thoughts
In conclusion, picking the correct music to test your speakers can significantly improve your listening experience. You may test your speakers’ capabilities and find any flaws by choosing music with a wide variety of frequencies, a large dynamic range, and high bitrates.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that the ideal songs to test your speakers will depend on the kind of speakers you have and your individual musical preferences. However, there are some songs that are widely acknowledged as excellent gauges of speaker performance. These songs feature a range of instruments and voices along with high-quality sound production to assist you pinpoint any speaker problems.
It’s crucial to consider the speakers’ placement as well as the room’s acoustics while testing your speakers. The listening experience can be greatly improved by using speakers that are installed in the proper location.
Finally, it’s important to remember that testing your speakers is a continuous process. It’s crucial to regularly test your speakers as you use them to make sure they’re operating at their full efficiency. You may continue to enjoy high-quality sound and make the most of your investment by doing this.
Closing Remarks:
To close, songs with a wide variety of frequencies, a large dynamic range, and high bitrates are the best for testing your speakers. You can find any flaws and make sure your speakers are operating at their peak performance by playing music that has been specifically created to strain your speakers to their absolute limits. Play some music, then begin testing your speakers right away! This article is not about the best speakers to purchase, but rather about how to check your current speaker’s strengths and weaknesses.
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A music enthusiast who has taken his passion for music to the next level by starting his own blog. He spends most of his free time listening to new albums, attending concerts, and researching emerging artists.
What sets John apart from other music bloggers is his ability to connect with his readers on a personal level. His writing style is warm and engaging, making it easy for readers to relate to him as both a fellow music lover and someone who truly cares about the art form.
John’s love for music started at a young age when he discovered classic rock through his father’s vinyl collection. Since then, he has expanded his musical horizons to include everything from indie rock to hip hop and beyond.
As a blogger, John has found a way to share his love of music with others while also providing valuable insights into the industry.