For speakers I use a half dozen or so tracks at the dealers from different genres. Important. I was listening to a pair of speakers with only jazz and thinking pretty good. Switched to a Cat Power song which sound entirely different than I’d ever heard it before, like a different mix. Terrible. Next. The ultimate and most important is at home, but one can get a pretty good sense of what will work or not at the dealers. Be sure to push them against or away from the wall, etc. to try and emulate your home. I have my speakers wide and sit on the floor and near(ish) a lot so that is what I try when auditioning (and I love my Audio Physic Compact Classics).
For cable changes etc best to focus on one or two tracks (and you’ll get sick of them). The best one for me has been Ahmad Jamal’s “Ahmad’s Blues” title track. It’s pretty much bass and piano, with some really distinct long trebly rolls at the beginning. So I would just ask myself does it sound more or less like a piano? How mushed together (or not) are the separate trills? How easy is to follow, where is it in the room, etc. And then do the same for the bass.
I guess I use a sort of sub-conscious tune-dem as well: how easy it is to follow any particular instrument which tends to signify more separation and drop in the ‘noise’ floor, and also how much more or less fatiguing and/or tinnitus triggering over longer term or louder listening.
Thanks for your comment. Speakers are the easiest thing to hear, especially in a dealer space where they can be positioned to work as they are intended (which is not always possible at home).
Cables, amplifiers, source components: That is where it becomes subtle and listening to tracks with just a few instruments, especially piano or guitar, should show you some things as decaying notes and overtones that some systems will be masked or not be reproduced at all.
Lot’s of good advice here, to which I would add the following. It’s worthwhile to enlist a second set of ears belonging to someone whose musical judgement you trust, but who is entirely disinterested in, and therefore not distracted by, technospeak or arcane audiophile jargon. For me, this would be my wife. She has saved me on several occasions from shelling out for minor incremental improvements in favour of upgrades with significant impact.
Yes indeed that can be useful, helping identify if what I think I’m hearing is real, and for tge better. As an extreme example, when I first heard Dave DAC my cellist son was with me on the trip and came in just out of curiosity, uninterested in hifi but instead of sitting in the car for a couple of hours. Started with hearing my Hugo, as the base point, then TT, about which he made some favourable comments at the end, but when Dave started playing it was only just into about the second bar when my son said “wow” under his breath but just loud enough for me to hear - like an echo of my own reaction.