Most Challenging CD

Dafos IMHO has its most lasting quality in the cut with the crashing bass drum. When your system replicates the sound in one of the cuts on side two, I forget which, clearly for what it is, not just a big unmusical sound, you're well on your way to having, at a minimum, a system with excellent bass response.

I really don't listen to this recording that much, even though it is a superb recording the content is not exactly something I want to hear on a regular basis. Your comment got me listening to it on my main system again and I'm hearing it a different way - there are a few cuts that get pretty busy and dramatic and do test the system in a way that is more than just bass. Still, it's easy to be very impressed by this album on even a simple system. I think it has to do with the stark isolation of the sounds in many of the cuts, even those dramatic percussion cuts you reference. If the OP just wants albums to test bass abilities there are quite a few others as well, but that's only one measure of a system's abilities. Plenty of threads on that too. I guess in relation to the OP's impressions of the 1812 and Nutcracker the suggestion is a very good one as the impact of percussion cuts on Dafos have a very similar effect. Still, I think there's far more to a good system than being knocked back in your seat by convincing bass reproduction (though I must admit, I do enjoy that quality as well).

Eric Kunzel's Roundup on Telarc has twelve real gunshots in succession. Enjoy.

Beethoven's 'Wellington's Victor' has plenty of gunshots...mass musket fire and also a bunch of 12 pounders firing various charge levels.

The initial cannon shot at the start of the battle is brutal.

This is also a Telarc Disk.

I have plenty of disks which, however, are MORE challenging for what they DO NOT have rather than what they DO.

"Ein Straussfest" on Telarc has the most challenging dynamics I can think of in my collection.

Extreme dynamics and transients are the thing that will do in most recording and playback systems the easiest, I believe.

These characterize the recorded gunshots and explosives in that recording.

I think several early Telarc recordings have these kinds of extreme dynamics which was a novelty aspect of some the early CD recordings offered, especially on Telarc.

I think as time went on, record producers realized that these extreme dynamics and transients were too much for most peoples playback gear to handle and tended to sound distorted and bad in most cases, including quiet passages that could not be heard by most, especially in cars, so they backed off a bit from attempting to capture these extreme dynamics in most recordings as things progressed and the novelty wore off.

Also, many people's record players could not track the heavily modulated grooves in the vinyl versions of a lot of the early commercial telarc digitally recorded records taht came out in teh very late 1970's, so that did not work well for the masses either other than as a novelty.

"the softest sheen on a voice"

This is somewhat about transient response as well.

Transients are present in many flavors and to various degrees at many frequencies throughout all recordings, to some extent.

A lot of modern high end systems do a decent job handling transients, although some better than others.

I 've found a lot of teh classic 7 Moody Blues remaster albums to be perhaps the most challenging in this regard for me. Perhaps because these recordings have a lot of murky, low frequency dynamics occurring that are very challenging for a system to resolve fully. When it does though, as is possible with some of teh newer CD remasters more so than the originals, a lot of transient detail and sharpness emerges on the recordings overall though that is otherwise usually obscured.

Part of this for me is that I love these recordings in particular so getting the most out of them has been an ongoing challenge that really matters for me over the years since I first started picking them up on vinyl over 35 years ago.

I suppose getting the most possible out of most any decent recording one really cares about is perhaps always the most challenging case in practice that matters for most audiophiles in that here is where we tend to seek the highest standards that matter to us most.