Albums you use to test your gears?

I use the first cut of side two, In Your Eyes, from Peter Gabriel's "So" album to test tonearm/cartridge alignment.

The words "instincts" and "churches" are repeated a number of times. They will mistrack i.e. excessive sibilance if your alignment is off.

Listen for clarity and neatness of the letter "S" in both words.

This of course does not guarantee ideal alignment but, among others, it's one of the passages I use when setting up a tonearm and/or cartridge.

use your favorites

I like Pink Floyd wish you were here and Steely Dan to test out new gear,

"use your favorites"

Yes, that is very true. Actually that is what I am doing. I have a decent amount of collections (500 CDs, 500 LPs). I just needed an additional help.

It is both fun and pain on doing this.
Fun part is if I recognize the sonic improvement from upgraded gears. Pain when I don't.
I read from somewhere that one will be blessed if he/she does not recognize differences among different gears because, then she/he does not need to spend $$$$ to search for better sound. Well, I am not the blessed one. ;-)

One thing I recognized over the weekend is that Yaqin does pretty good for full orchestration on LP. Even though it has less power it produces less congested and muddled sound than Linn. For rest of other music -- solo/chamber classical, acoustic jazz, vocal, pop/rock -- Linn is much more lively and dynamic, and of course, much more power. Yaqin has been somewhat flat on CDs for most music I tried, but Linn is miles different on CDs.

For speaker cables, the difference between the cheap single wire XLO cable has done pretty good so far. Zu biwire WAX produces a marginally better sound -- a little bit deeper base and wider sound stage. But, the MSRP of the two cables are over 10 fold (less than $100 vs $1000). I don't think I can justify the price difference.

I ordered a few more CDs and LPs upon your suggestion. I may come back once I find something more worthwhile to write about.

Thanks all.