Best Song For Testing Your Stereo Speakers Revealed

What songs would you assume would be ideal for testing a new pair of stereo speakers?

Perhaps something with plenty of dynamics and varied instrumentation – say, Bohemian Rhapsody – or a very loud track to test speaker volume. Or maybe a thumping electronic song. But what if we said a slower, acoustic-based song is the best song to test speakers, according to an expert?

In a recent episode of the Wirecutter Podcast, Brent Butterworth, a senior staff writer for The New York Times’ Wirecutter series with decades of experience in testing speakers, revealed that Fast Car by Tracy Chapman is the ultimate song to test music playing on speakers.

Early in the chat, Butterworth reveals that he cranks up the volume on all speakers to measure their sound levels before lowering the volume for his personal listening test. He often spins a ZZ Top song produced by Rick Rubin, as the producer was “notorious for really loud recordings.”

Butterworth then stated that Fast Car is the best song for evaluating audio equipment by “audio scientists.” After Bohemian Rhapsody was mentioned as a song for testing said equipment, Butterworth commented that the Queen classic is a “Great song,” but it’s “not so great for testing speakers.”

Here’s the breakdown on Fast Car:

The more the song fills up the frequency band, the better it is. So, it has some bass in it, some bass guitar, and then it has acoustic guitar, which is real, a lot of high frequency and delicate. And you can hear if the acoustic guitar sounds bad; it'll sound muffled or it'll sound grating or somewhere in between.

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 distant or a little bit like she's singing in a cardboard box or something like that. So, I put that on with a speaker, and it's just like, nope. Or maybe I get a $30 speaker, I'm like, ‘Oh, that was a good speaker.’

You can tell so much and once you get used to doing this, you can tell so much in about 30 seconds.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Fast Car was the debut single by Tracy Chapman, released in April 1988. The song won the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance award at the 1989 Grammy Awards and debuted at #4 on the ARIA Singles Chart before receiving three successful covers.

Giving Fast Car a new lease of life, the track has received two successful electronic covers – one by Swedish DJ Tobtok and another by British DJ Jonas Blue. However, it was a country cover by Luke Combs that took the song to another stratosphere.

Luke Combs’ version of Fast Car went to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts in 2023 and led to Combs and, by extension, Chapman, winning the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year, making her the first black woman to win the award.