What Is A Reference Recording?

Its difficult to recommend a reference recording because musical tastes vary so greatly from one individual to another. So what might work for me, might now work for you at all.

Some CD’s are engineered better than others which leads me to believe that the artist is particular about the quality of their sound.

My respect for the artist goes way up when I discover someone like that, however I’ve been disappointed after I bought their next CD to find that the quality of the recording was awful, so you just never know.

Many tests have been done over the years using rock, jazz, pop and classical to see which type of recordings were best for spotting loudspeaker distortion and coloration. These were double blind tests and it turned out that classical recordings were chosen as the most reliable for differentiating good speakers from bad speakers. Why? Because of classical musics wide range of frequencies and harmonics.

Some people don’t consider that rock music can be used as a reference recording due to some of it being heavily distorted (shredding guitars man!), but I disagree. If rock is the type of music you listen to most often and you are familiar with the way a certain instrument should sound and you have some particularly well engineered CD’s that are rock, then by all means use them…I do!