The best song to test out your speakers, according to science
I moved house a few years ago, and when buying all the bits and bobs that I could use to make this new place feel like home, one of the most important things I bought were speakers. After all, what is a house without music?
Music is an incredibly natural component in all of our lives. Even if you aren’t actively listening to it, birdsong, the whistle in the wind, the rhythm of footsteps, all mean that even just by getting out into the world, you’re exposed to some kind of melody. The result is that music is one of the most important aspects of all our lives, it’s something we surround ourselves with and turn to when we’re on our highest high or making our way through our lowest low.
Given we turn to music so frequently in our lives, it’s important that we have good equipment to listen to it on. There are plenty of great speakers and headphones out there which you can choose from, varying in price from £30 to £3000. However, the volume and variety of items means that it can be hard to know exactly which model you should go for. If only there were a song you could use to test out how good a speaker actually is. Well, it turns out, there is.
It’s worth noting that there is certainly an element of subjectivity involved here. If you listen to music that is quite bass-heavy, then you are going to want some speakers that can bring out this quality in a song. Equally, if you love metal, you’ll want speakers that can facilitate the crisp crunch of an electric guitar.
However, if you don’t have a particular genre of music that you want to cater for and you’re generally just looking for some good speakers, it turns out one of the best songs that you can listen to is Tracy Chapman’s beautiful track ‘Fast Cars’.
The song is one of the most moving ever committed to the airwaves. It’s about both hope and hopelessness, as Chapman sings about being in a relationship with a lazy partner but dreaming of eventually driving to somewhere better. As soon as that iconic guitar line kicks in at the beginning of the track, everyone within listening distance sets aside the next few minutes to enjoy the track in full.
“It very generally represents the world that I saw when I was growing up and Cleveland, Ohio, coming from a working-class background, being raised by a single mom and being in a community of people who were struggling,” said Chapman when discussing the track, “Everyone was working hard and hoping that things would get better.”
Of course, while the song is a classic, it’s not the quality of the song that makes it perfect, but the fact that it uses different frequencies more so than any other track. Expert Brent Butterworth explained why it’s such a good song to test the audio quality of some equipment because the highest and lowest sounds you come across in music are on full display.
“The more the song sort of fills up the frequency band, the better it is,” said Butterworth, “So, it has some bass in it, you know, some like bass guitar, and then it has acoustic guitar, which is real kind of a lot of high frequency and delicate, and then you can hear her voice and the way her voice is recorded on that is really clear, but a lot of speakers start to make it sound kind of distant or kind of a little bit like she’s singing in a cardboard box or something like that”.
“I think for most people that’s the easiest way to evaluate voice quality. Because we listen to voices all day long.”
