full-scale orchestral music—best test of speakers’ potential?

Here’s a general observation made after visiting many rooms and listening to many loudspeakers at CAF: full-scale orchestral music, i.e. recordings of large symphony orchestras, provide the most demanding test of a speaker’s abilities.  I’d argue this for two reasons.

1. Audio systems attempt to create a simulacrum of an acoustic event in your living room.  That original event may have occurred in a tiny jazz club or a huge arena, and everything in between.  That is to say, the space in which it occurred may be very similar in size to your listening room, or it may be very different.  Given the size, on stage, of a full orchestra, and given the size of the auditoriums where they play, it’s very challenging for a system to reproduce the impression of that size in your living room—none are perfect, but some are better than others in providing the right kinds of cues.

2. Another variable here is that the music played may have been acoustic or electronically amplified.  Recordings of acoustic instruments and voice remove one extra step in the long chain of reproduction: we know pretty much what a violin should sound like, but what should a certain Gibson guitar through a certain Peavey amp sound like?

Massed violins playing fortissimo are the most stringent test of a speaker’s treble range.  In room after room, I heard rock, pop, jazz, blues, folk, etc. etc. reproduced really very beautifully, but often when an orchestral piece came on, it could sound harsh, steely, astringent, nails on chalkboard.  The fault of the recording, you say.  But a few speakers (I’m not naming names, to avoid that kind of argument), didn’t do that, and sailed through the test.