Reverence for Reference

~ Tuesday January 13 2009 09:00
Wow, finally thought about something to blog about. Last week my parents bought a new television. Because they used to have a CRT, they decided to do some main room redecoration, changing furniture, new furniture. Anyways, after all that work was done, we had to test it, audiowise.

My parents still haven’t converted to surround yet. But if you hear their stereo you won’t blame them. They have really (old) high end speakers and a Class A Amplifier. They also have a Denon cd player with an unprecedented Digital to Analog converter. It doesn’t matter which other player you connect, this 25 year old Denon kicks all of their asses. Believe me, I tried.

Now about the test. You know Faithless? In 1996, when they still were pretty unknown, my dad had to travel a lot, and one time he bought their first album. The main album is called Reverence, but it also had a bonus cd called Irreverence. To my knowledge the bonus cd isn’t being sold anymore. Also the second pressing doesn’t have the exact same full sound the first pressing had. So what’s so special about using this album for testing? Let’s just walk through, what we have begun to describe here as THE test.

First you put in Reverence, track 1, also called "Reverence". Listen to it. You should hear a kind of reverse string and a piano tone, a male voice rapping. This is a pretty neutral sound which is a good start test. It’s also balanced equally, so you can use it to find your center spot. Then the rap continues into “I have no knowledge of fear, cause I’m here to do Work” At that point you hear the most awesome bass ever. That bass should sound really full. And most of the time you can actually feel the bass with your body. Listen to it and hear if you can spot any faults in the ultrasound or hear tremble from anywhere besides the speakers themselves. Also this is the time to adjust your systems bass settings. The sound should be full, round but also natural. If the setting is too high, the tremble usually kicks in, too low and the roundness disappears.

Setup? Great, let’s continue. The sound then becomes fuller and fuller as the sequence builds. It starts as pretty much divided high, mid tones and lows and blends towards a nice mix. Great crossover test. After 2 minutes the test part is done. You should now know what your system is capable of.

Second and last test. After setting up with Reverence, you put in Irreverence, track 7, a song Called "Drifting Away (Paradiso Mix)". This is probably the weirdest dance song you ever heard, but again the start is great for testing. We hear a female opera voice. Listen again, carefully. You should hear the voice scatter around the room, hear the acoustics. If you have difficulty hearing it, try closing your eyes. There’s something about this mix that the one on Reverence doesn’t have and it’s more than just the piano. It has something to do with the used reverb and the mix with the synths.

Of course, all of this testing is nitpicking. But if you’re sensitive to good quality audio it’s worth it. My parents’ new setup passed Reverence of course (the equipment remained the same), but it failed Drifting Away miserably (acoustics changed). You could hear that the acoustics of the right speaker wasn’t as wide as left, which made sense, because right is between two bookcases and left stands free.

Of course there are a lot of other ways to test your system, but this is the way we have been testing since 1996. It even made a teacher a Faithless fan when I tested the sound for a school party. So if you ever want to know my opinion about your sound system, ask me to bring Reverence with me.

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