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For my upcoming speaker comparison tool or interactive database (or however it will be called then) I wanted to cover many modern and representative music-genres that should give you a better idea of how a speaker behaves with this or that kind of music. Jump in to help me finding the right tracks.


You must understand that I cannot cover all possible genres but rather concentrated on the music that I personally like to listen to, starting from Jazz over to Jazz/Funk Fusion, but also R&B, House, Electronica, Lounge etc. I will be playing short excerpts for each genre as it would otherwise take too long to record every single speaker with longer segments.
It is hard to find the right material, and instead of using some royalty-free junk offered by many providers I took the risk to contact some of the greatest musicians that I know and always loved to listen to. Unfortunately many don't seem to have any interest at all, others do not even bother to respond, but some indeed gave me the permission to use their tracks. That's why I would like to first thank every artist who will be included with his/her music. I am still undecided about particular genres as I am missing any representative track for "House" which I would like to include by all means. I contacted some of the best artists like Miguel Migs, Richard Earnshaw, Simon Grey, Louis Benedetti, as well as Opolopo and Dance/progressive House artist Dinka, but none of them showed any interest at all.

Now I would like to ask for your help and also some feedback about the music I already selected. Maybe you know someone or are a musician yourself and would like to contribute as well. Apart from something for the House-genre I would also need a nice acoustic Jazz-track as I am not quite satisfied with what I have so far. Please free to put your thoughts into the comment section, or send me a message. The sooner the whole music list is complete, the sooner I can start with the recording procedure. I want the music selection to remain consistent for a longer period of time, otherwise such a comparison won't make much sense if older recordings are not compatible with newer ones. That's why I wanted to use tracks that can reveal the sound differences of various speakers on the one hand but should be interesting and exciting to listen to on the other hand.

But now some details about the music that I already chose with each track representing one particular genre. I also added a transcoded snippet for each track for you to have a listen. The mp3-quality is worse than usual as I put these tracks here just for demonstration purposes and cannot provide the original high-quality recordings for free:

Smooth Jazz:

 
I love listening to Smooth Jazz although many might dismiss it as elevator muzak, but I find Smooth Jazz very relaxing and harmonically much more demanding than any pop-tune you usually hear on the radio. The track for Smooth Jazz was provided by Konstantin Klashtorni and is an exclusive short jingle he sent me. Konstantin Klashtorni is a saxophone player and he released lots of albums with different aliases like "Kool&Klean" or "Chillaxing Jazz Kollektion" etc. His arrangements are mostly synthesizer based and resemble a bit the sound of Paul Hardcastle, but Konstantin's music has a stronger tendency towards Smooth Jazz unlike Paul whose latest releases are rather Lounge/Chillout with only a slight touch of Jazz. The track used here has Konstantin's characteristical sound with some Hip-hop like beat and an overall fat mix, which can bring some smaller speaker to their limits pretty quickly when played at higher levels.

Jazz/Funk:

 
Tom O'Grady's band Resolution88 was so kind to allow the use of one of their tracks. If you don't know Resolution88 yet, you have to absolutely check them out if you like 70s retro sounding Jazz/Funk similar to Herbie Hancock's Headhunters. Although a bit old-school sounding the mixes of Resolution88 are fat and modern and thanks to sophisticated mastering sound extremly dynamic and powerful when played through a good set of speakers. I used an excerpt of the track "Collidoscope" as it has some pounding drums which tend to distort on many portable speakers that don't apply any necessary limiting algorithms.

Soul/R&B:

 
I loved Soulpersona since the very beginning, when I listened to his first album "Soulacoaster", which was a mix of Electronica, NuJazz, AcidJazz and Soul with notable vocals from Princess Freesia. In the meantime he strengthened his style and his subsequent albums as well as the production work for Princess Freesia's solo albums became better and more diversified. SoulP gave me the permission to use his tracks and the track I chose for the speaker comparisons comes from his collaboration with Princess Freesia called "Soulperfreesia" with their album "Amalgamation" which is a kind of 80s Boogie-style R&B/Soul-track with Princess Freesia singing the vocal part. The mix is really quite heavy with very loud mastering and needs really good speakers to sound clean.

House:

 
Unfortunately I couldn't find any suitable House-track yet. All my favorite artists didn't care. I could simply use some of my own older tracks, but I just don't think they are good enough or representative for this genre, besides they are missing the particular touch of a professional mastering. Instead of House I thought to include a nice NuDisco or rather Dreamwave track that many seem to be liking. It is called "Far Away" from MK2 and comes as free track to be downloaded from the Youtube audio library. It doesn't have those pounding kick-drums common for House, which make all smaller speakers sweat, but if I don't find anything better, I might keep that one. If you have other suggestions please let me know.
Update: I have finally settled for a kind of Progressive-House/Dance track from "Inner Smile" which I licenced from music provider Yookamusic. I chose the instrumental version without vocals and edited it slightly to shorten it and compress the most important parts together.

Downtempo/Triphop:

 
The track used here reminds me a bit of the Triphop/Dub stuff Kruder&Dorfmeister were doing back in the 90s. It comes from "I Chill Music Factory" and none less than Fridrik Karlsson is hiding behind this alias. For those who don't know Fridrik Karlsson, it is the guitarist from the great Fusion/Pop group Mezzoforte who had huge success in the 80s with their Hit "Garden Party". Lately Fridrik as solo artist concentrated more on producing Chillout/Lounge music and if you really like high quality music for relaxing etc, you should check out his releases for "I Chill Music Factory" and "The Feel Good Collection". Although all "I Chill Music" releases are licence-free in general, I nevertheless asked Fridrik if it was OK to use one of his tracks for this purpose, and he didn't have a problem with it.

Jazz:

 
 
 
I wanted to have an acoustic Jazz track included but it was impossible for me to find any professional Jazztrio that would like to have one of their tracks being used therefore I had to fall back to the Youtube audio library again and choose some tracks from there. I have 3 snippets which I am not quite sure for which I should settle. I like the second "Ersatz Bossa" quite much, because it is the most punchy mix, and the strong acoustic bass together with the ride cymbals can easily cause problems with intermodulation distortion on many speakers, but I don't like the bossa style that much. Maybe  fhe first snipped: "Almost A Year Ago" or the third: "Bluesy Vibes" are better choices although both these mixes are not as revealing.

Rock:

 
I am not a Rock listener at all, but many others are always asking for rock-tracks to be played therefore I wanted to have one included as well. This track is also from the Youtube audio library by the band "Silent Partner" and called "Finals". It sounds a bit like a recording of early "Police" and it caught my attention because of its very aggressive mix with both deep bass and sharp treble at the same time. Most smaller speakers can't handle the sustaining strong bass and either tend to rattle or the bass bleeds into the higher frequencies easily revealing intermodulation distortion already at lower levels.

Classic:

 
For all Classic-lovers I decided to include this genre as well. It was a tough choice to find something suitable as "Classic" has so many subgenres involved. While many will prefer the baroque sound of Bach or Vivaldi, others maybe like Gershwin's Jazzy compositions more. I settled for an excerpt of a an opus from Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowky: C-Dur Serenade for strings Op. 48 that is a catchy romantic piece and in this case a quite good recording which unfortunately is not that common for many classical recordings which sometimes tend to sound a bit dull and distant.

This is what I have so far, I hope you like the selection. Please bear in mind that I can only use pieces where I have either the permission from the original artist to use them or that are royalty free to begin with. Initially I wanted to cover some more electronic genres like Drum&Bass, NuJazz etc, but I think it would be overkill to include everything. Neither can I cover many other genres like "Country" or "Folk" or whatever, as I don't listen to them and I wouldn't even know any suitable artists either.
I really want this tool to become something special and helpful to anyone. Of course I welcome any comment what you think about it so far.

Dear readers&friends,

Maybe some have already noticed, but downloadlable is now reachable through its own domain:

http://www.downloadlable.blogspot.com/

I would also like to give my trusty readers the ability to try out my speaker comparison tool.
There is still some work to be done with this speaker audio database, but many will hopefully appreciate the ability to test it already now in an unfinished state. There are some bugs, and some features like "real volume" is not working properly yet, as well as "volume guide". The tutorial links at the top "how to use the tool" and details about the "recording setup" are also just placeholders so far and when everything is finished there will be an introduction video published on Youtube to make it really official.

There are currently more than 30 different speakers added, I also have measurements for nearly all of these speakers, but I have to edit and prepare them first before being able to add them to the database. I will also work on the description for each speaker, but as I am continuously adding more and more speakers (next will be the Marshall Kilburn for example and the JBL Xtreme shortly after), I have little time to work on all the small details now, therefore I would like you to try everything out as is.
The tool only works on desktop systems so far, as there seems to be a limitation with Android and iOS which are not able to play 2 videos simultaneously.

I hope you will enjoy it, feel free to play with it. I am not really sure yet, how good the tool will work and how much acceptance it will gain. But I hope it will become helpful at some point.

Here you go:

http://switcher.downloadlable.blogspot.com/

yours, Oluv

 
I would like to briefly introduce the upcoming speaker audio database. All programming work has been meanwhile finished. I also finished the first recordings of most speakers I currently have at home, it will still take some time until I have all the content put together to finally publish everything. Here I just want to give you some information about the idea behind this database and what you can expect from it.

With this database I wanted to create a ressource that would allow cross-reference comparisons for each portable speaker that is included on a consistent basis. I wanted to provide as much data as possible for each speaker including audio samples, along the way with measurements, additional notes and links to any of my detailed reviews if available.
But the most important part is probably the audio part I guess, as this will give you a very first idea what kind of audio quality you can expect from a given speaker. I really wanted the result to be as close to the real sound as possible, therefore I settled for binaural audio recordings and chose microphones with a very natural and flat frequency response that I edit further with some fixed equalization to bring the sound even closer to reality. I will post more details about the exact recording procedure as soon as the database is up and running. But I think with my recording setup you will get a very realistic impression of how the speakers will sound in the room where they were recorded. The playback of binaural recordings requires headphones for optimum results and the better and more neutral sounding the used headphone is, the more realistic it will sound. Therefore avoid using any sounded Beats-crap, but rather studioquality headphones tuned for a flat sound reproduction. In my case I am using the B&O Beoplay H6 headphones, which sound extremely close to the recorded speakers as if they were standing directly in front of me. I tried some other headphones models and although even with the cheapest ones you will always notice the relative differences between 2 speaker recordings, only high quality headphones will give you that kind of "real-life" experience with all the subtle details captured. I also added the original recording for reference, so that you will be able to switch between a particular speaker and the original music, this way a kind of indirect comparison to reveal any sound coloration of a speaker will also become possible, something I was already experimenting with for my "speaker fidelity tests".

For the audio part of the database I selected short excerpts of 8 different genres to be played through each speaker (you can read more about the music selection here) which are recorded at 2 different loudness levels. One level is what I call "standard volume" and another one at each speaker's "maximum volume". "Standard volume" is a volume I settled for which is comfortable to listen to, without being too loud or too soft and one that even most smaller speakers can reach. To bring this into some context: this is about the highest volume level of a Jambox, although the Jambox will already distort heavily at this level many other speakers being not that close to their limit will still play fine, but even a Bose Soundlink Mini (playing at around 70%) or an Infinity One will already sound dirty at this particular level due to their overly pushed bass. It didn't make much sense to record the speakers at even lower levels as the results would not be representative.
Standard volume is recorded with the speakers standing about 1m away. For a situation closer to reality the speakers are about 5m away for the maximum volume recording, because nobody would probably turn the larger speakers to the maximum while sitting directly in front of them.
The maximum volume part is to give you an idea how loud a speaker can play compared to the other ones, but also how good it is able to fill the room with sound and last not least if it is usable at all at maximum volume because of too strong distortion etc.
As both standard and maximum volume recordings are recorded at different gains, there is also a "real volume" switch which will bring both into the same relation to each other again when activated. This together with an additional "volume guide" part will allow you to use my voice as rough guide in order to get the correct listening loudness thus you will be able to hear the recordings with the actual loudness the speakers were playing in reality.

Of course this tool cannot replace the listening experience you get in real life, but I think this is as close as you can get in "virtual life".

Please understand that as I wanted to make the database accessible for free, I have to rely on ads and affiliate links but also voluntary donations to keep it alive. Therfore so far everything is based on Youtube and their adsense service. I am not quite sure how helpful and successful this database may become in future, but for an even better experience and improved audio-quality I might switch everything to a subscription based offer because much features I wanted to include are not possible through the Youtube-solution. You have to know that this all not only takes lots of time to create, but also lots of money. So either I will have to try monetizing it in some way or the other, or I will have to stop doing it if I cannot afford it anymore.

From what I can say now, I think this database will really become something quite uniqe, and I am enjoying playing with it a lot! I hope you will enjoy it too and hope you can still be patient a little bit!

Thanks, your O.