What are some good songs for testing the range and quality of a new pair of headphones?

What You Know by Two Door Cinema Club, for capturing a poppy atmosphere. Bloodbuzz Ohio by The National, for deep, booming vocals Paradise by Coldplay, for synths and high-end vocals

Probably the best thing to play on any audio system to get a good idea of its quality is a spoken word recording. The best one would be one you are familiar with. The reason is that we are very used to listening to the human voice for many reasons and very good at detecting things that are a little off in its sound. Perhaps because of this a great deal of music places its significant content in the same frequency band as the human speaking voice. In addition to this the best songs to play would be the ones you are likely to listen to on the headphones and ideally ones you are familiar with as well.

Madness by Muse Too Close by Alex Clare Teardrop by Massive Attack Love Lockdown by Kanye West There are so many!

X-You by Avicii Without You by David Guetta

Having done this exercise recently here are a few things to consider: Find a selection of music you know well and you know what about those tracks you like. Get to know them on your favourite listening system. Work out what sound you want from your headphones, so when your chosen songs sound good that is the sort if good sound you want. That's the realisation I came to when I was buying some new ones - the Beyer Dynamics I recently bought have a sound that is what I want my live mixes to sound like when I take the headphones off.

Enya's "Carrbian Blue" is the very best testing song for any audio system. It covers all parts of the audio spectrum and is one of the best mixed and mastered songs. It can really show off a great pair of headphones or show off how bad your phone speakers are. Make sure to listen to the remastered 2009 version.