Anything that scores in the green zone here
http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/ is appropriate and if you take some time to look, you will see that often the same album can score very high or very low depending on which dial-monkey mastered it. Perhaps that is why there is some disagreement here about some bands/albums...
Get that out of the way first, then the second-most important thing is that it is music that you really love and are very, very familiar with. No sense in taking someone's advice about a classical or jazz fusion song/album as being a great way to evaluate a system if you have never heard the music and do not like the style of music to begin with. On the other hand, sometimes it is interesting to see how well your system performs with various types of music, even if you don't plan on listening to it all that often. In this case, it makes sense to seek advice and get
well-mastered versions.
For me, it is a combination of (the best versions I can find of) Dire Straits - Dire Straits, Steely Dan - AJA and/or Gaucho, The Doors - Morrison Hotel, Bowie, Barenaked Ladies, Spirit of the West., etc.,etc. through to jazz including Haden/Metheny - Beyond the Missouri Sky, Ernie Watts - Unity, Cooder and Bhatt - A Meeting by the River, then over to random selections from "Best Audiophile Voices", then some Norah Jones, some Leonard Cohen, Patricia Barber, Chie Ayado... and finally on to some classical, starting with some excellent solo cello and moving up to Mozart violin concertos. Often I throw in some Ska and old Reggae, as a friend of mine is getting me more and more interested in that stuff, but that is usually after I have done my "evaluation". This list is far from complete. Tons of music works for me because I spend many hours a day listening (not passively, while doing other things, just listening) so I am intimately familiar with a lot of my music. As long as it is well-mastered, I can use just about any of it for evaluation.
:tears::thumbsdn:
