Just arrived:
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I love the bass and the songs, but I was not able to turn up the volume to enjoy the big bass from my big speakers yet because my wife is not crazy about it. The bass has to wait after our vacation.
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Rattled my wife’s dental plate. When the last track finished her comment was “Isn’t there more?” 
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It was a genuinely impressive recording. The pipe organ stuff was fantastic. I would have loved something using the Moog Taurus bass pedals like Genesis employed in the old days. They’re amazing. Still a great buy for my collection.
Mike in Dayton
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@scotte1 beat me to the punch on this one! My copy arrived yesterday and I was able to listen to it today! Great sounding recording my favorite tracks are number 5 Sheps Dream and track 8 How Deep is the Ocean. The pipe organ music is also pretty good!
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Me too.
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FYI, the cardboard sleeve with my SACD purchase is so tight I have to man-handle the disc to get it out of the packaging.
You might want to do a quick QA check and make sure my experience is not much more than a one-off.
I am afraid that I will damage the disc over time.
FYI.
SEE
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Yeah…I had the same problem. A plastic jewel case and a booklet would have sufficed. I did crap myself though on a couple of tracks. My 4x SVS SB-1000’s kept up though.
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Mine arrived in the same sleeve unscathed with no issues. The Rel subs enjoyed the low frequencies.
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Yes, that was the bass I’ve been looking for. Great tracks, and I would vote for Art of HiFi: Bass Vol. 2
Thanks, guys! Happy you enjoyed our first in the series. Yes, the packaging sucked. I am so sorry. Fortunately, it won’t harm the disc. It’s just a royal pain in the keester. We have since learned our lesson on that and this won’t happen again.
A Bass 2 project would be fun. I was thinking of working on an imaging series next. Thoughts? What would you like to see/hear?
Or, is there another HiFi subject you’d like better? I am just now writing a Paul’s Post on the subject and asking what people are most interested in.
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I would like to see a focus on “natural tonality”, for lack of a better term.
Maybe some tracks devoted to the capture of solo instruments at a really high level of clarity. For example:
Brass (trumpet, trombone, etc.)
Strings (acoustic guitar, harp, banjo, etc.)
Percussion (tympani, cymbals, bongos, etc.)
Reeds (oboe, saxophone, clarinet, etc.
Other?
The idea would be to demonstrate what well-recorded and well-played, un-amplified instruments are capable of in a well-reproduced context and to focus on “snap”, decay, clarity, etc.
Thoughts…?
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Interesting idea. I suspect there are many who really do not know what instruments sound like, having heard them only on recordings, amplified, compressed, or as massed ensembles.
I would also include uncompressed vocals. Singers have an astonishing dynamic range, and there is surprising dynamic range in even an individual sung word/short phrase.
Perhaps include the same sung/played music compressed so the listener can hear the difference.
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The Fugue after the Toccata. The Toccata was too short at 2.5 minutes
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I just want more jazz recordings. If there was a Ron Miles recording done before he passed I’d love to see that very soon.
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The DSD256 download has a different track listing, where 2 and 8 are reversed. I find “Take what you need” deep, quite deep.
Right ON. And tuba too (played long long ago).
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Yes, imaging, and what @scotte1 said, natural sounding instruments. Another idea would be something with blooming, soaring vocals or super clean vocals. Also possibly something where the illusion of music sounds like it is being played live in the room.
My 4+gb zip file digital download arrived unharmed, totaling 6.28gb extracted for the DSD256. 
I think two things are no matter for this kind of audiophile test track series:
-
musical (genre, quality or artist) priority, as therefore we can buy good sounding normal albums of our taste
-
just great sounding mixed tracks with no other purpose, as this would just be an audiophile sampler then
My first understanding was, you want to provide topic related setup help with tracks suited for this, but I also understood, there is no instruction to perform any procedure to use them for setup.
So if I’m finally right, you provide topic related tracks which listeners can use to just experience this special topic in a batch.
As there are so many good recordings available which cover many kinds of characteristics, for me the most interesting NEW thing would be a “comparison album”, providing experiences, hardly anyone except sound engineers made before.
There could be various topics and albums:
- recording …
- mixing…
- mastering… techniques demonstrated (used/not used)
- DSD vs. PCM recording
- cirquit design differences
- microphones
- microphone setups
- etc.
End of this year a known, small, ultra high end manufacturer will release a piano recording, recorded direct (without mixing) to two different (tube/ss) tape machines (also cut to vinyl), DSD and PCM. This is the kind of demonstrations I prefer, as it delivers examples, most others are just talking about.