When I began my hi-fi reviewing journey some 11 years ago, I was offered a very good piece of advice: use music you’re familiar with, but not necessarily your absolute favourites. After all, comparing products typically requires repeating playback material, and I’ve little doubt the tubby synth bassline underpinning Michael Jackson’s P.Y.T or the boing-boing sound opening Big Thief’s Spud Infinity would indeed begin to grate upon a tenth listen within an hour, and ruin the songs forevermore. There is also the matter of one’s favourite music perhaps not making for a great test track...
What we have below then is not the What Hi-Fi? review team’s favourite albums but its favourite test albums – those which myself and my colleagues know like the back of our hands and deem most useful for sniffing out a product’s strengths and weaknesses. If our test rooms' walls could talk, they would likely know every lyric within the albums below... and be a little sick of them by now.
