What Hi-Fi? returns to test tracks: what they can tell us—and what they cannot

What Hi-Fi? has presented a new instalment in its music-for-hi-fi-testing lists: a summer selection of seven tracks that the publication describes as among the best its team has been using for that purpose. The accompanying line, “Red-hot tunes for a red-hot summer,” is promotional editorial language; it is not a technical demonstration.

This is not an isolated gesture. What Hi-Fi? has maintained a recurring editorial strand of guides and lists devoted to tracks for trying hi-fi systems, including a guide published in February 2026; at the end of 2025, it also returned to the track one of its writers had played most during the year.^[1][2] Nor does the format belong to What Hi-Fi? alone: CNET, Bang & Olufsen and communities such as Head-Fi have, at different times, circulated repertoires for listening to speakers and headphones.^[3][4][5]

A song is not a unit of measurement

A familiar track can be a useful listening reference. An exposed voice, a recognisable bass line, a dense arrangement or a dynamic contrast can direct attention towards particular aspects of playback. That usefulness, however, does not turn a song into a repeatable protocol, nor can it by itself establish that one system is better than another.

Between one listen and the next, the edition selected, the system, the room, the volume and the listener’s habits all matter. Familiarity with a recording can help a listener notice changes, but it also brings expectations. The vocabulary common to such guides—detail, bass, separation, soundstage—can organise comparative listening; it is not a universal conclusion about a recording or a piece of equipment.

When the work becomes diagnosis

That is where the format’s gain and loss emerge. Using a song as a reference can bring a listener back to performance, arrangement and texture with a degree of concentration uncommon in everyday listening. It can also reduce a work to an inventory of attributes: bass, imaging, micro-detail, depth.

The more productive question is not which song “sounds best,” but what musical relationship a track makes easier to hear attentively. A responsible recommendation should identify the version in use: whether it is an original edition, a remaster, a live recording or a streaming variant is not irrelevant. Those details, along with the seven tracks themselves and the testing conditions, are not included in the material available for this selection.

An invitation, not a doctrine

What Hi-Fi?’s list can be read as an invitation to listen more deliberately. It can be useful to begin with familiar music, follow one musical element at a time, and compare only under reasonably consistent conditions. What such a list cannot do is crown definitive tracks or support technical conclusions that apply to every system.

Until the repertoire and its editions are documented, LineaSonora cannot assess the suitability of each choice. The value of these lists lies less in declaring a canon than in reminding us that playback changes, however slightly, our relationship with music.