Most Challenging CD

"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.

Magfan, that sounds like the winner for realism attack. If the shot has a ear piercing snap and shock to it's delivery, it should make you jump.

I bought the Wellington's Victory disk because the original piece of music had been composed for a music playing machine....a really....really big music box, as it were. The music survives, the machine was never successful.
I put the disk on a buddies stereo...with then common 12" 3-way ported speakers from RSL, a Southern California company which made it own line of pretty good speakers. JBL copies.....
We were out front playing Frisbee when the first shot hit. My buddy went pale and bolted for the house to turn it down. It was so loud I thought the woofer cone would have been launched across the room, connected back the the speaker with a little curly-cue of wire.
I felt bad for a second, until I remembered some of the nasty stuff he had done to MY stereo over the years!

Magfan,LOL.

Without a doubt "Michael Bolton Sings Celine Dion's Greatest Hits".

Now that's challenging.