My Music

A friend recently asked about the music I listened to when I blog about equipment. Hmmm... I thought that would be a good blog entry from me, so here I would like to share with you the CDs I usually listen to when a piece of new equipment got into my system.

There is no rocket science involved in the selection of these CDs. The most important factor is that these are music that I enjoy and worth repeated listening, no point spinning a CD many times if you do not enjoy the music, right? As for sound quality, as long as it is good enough then it is good enough for me :-), you can see that some of them are not 'audiophile oriented', so to speak, especially the jazz and classical albums. Here we go:

Vocal:
From top, left to right
- Rickie Lee Jones: "Pop Pop"
- Shelby Lynne: "Just A Little Lovin' "
- 2V1G
- A Tao's Songs
- Manger compilation CD - the Livingston Taylor's tracks (tracks 11 & 12)
The first 4 CDs also have substantial guitar accompaniment, so they are also very good for evaluating guitar replay.

Jazz:

- Sonny Rollins: "The Bridge"

- Sonny Rollins: "Way Out West"

- Miles Davis: "Kind of Blue"

- Cannonball Adderley: "Somethin' Else"

Jazz music is great to evaluate pace and rhythm, anything that can make me go foot tapping will be in my good book. :-)

Classical (& Instrumental):

- Mozart's Symphonies (Neville Marriner and Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields)

- Modest Mussorgsky's Picture At An Exhibition (Claudio Abbado and London Symphony Orchestra)

The Mozart is sweet and flowy as the Mussorgsky is bombastic :-)

- George Winston - "Autumn" (piano solos)

This is not classical music. It is an excellent solo piano recording though. If your system had any brightness, the piano's high registers will expose it. On my system, this CD plays without brightness only after I warm up my monoblocks for at least 1 hour.

- Beethoven String Quartets No.6 and No.1 (Cleveland Quartet)

- Tchaikovsky and Korngold Violin Concertos (Anne-Sophie Mutter, Andre Previn, Vienna Philharmonic and London SO)

These two are for the strings.

And lastly, something more dynamic:

- Manger Compilation CD

many like track 15 The O-zone Percussion Group's 'Jazz Variants', I personally prefer tack 13 The Yuri Honing Trio's "Walking On The Moon".

- Hugh Masekela - "Hope"

Live recording, great music, energetic and powerful

- The Sheffield Lab Drum & Track Disc

My favourites are the 2 drum improvisation tracks

In addition to these, I also listen to a number of others, some are CDs newly acquired, some are re-discoverery - some current faves are Zee Avi, Youn Sun Nah's 'Voyage', Elgar's "Enigma Variations" and David Munyon's "Big Shoes" on Stockfisch Records.

Happy listening. :-)