Most Challenging CD

Dafos is a wonderful recording, but I don't really find it's particularly "challenging". It is very well recorded. I was listening while cooking this evening on my Squeezebox Boom and it sounded great even on that relatively mediocre component. It has great dynamic range, is stark, organic and beautiful...but all those things are fairly easy to do justice to on a well-assembled and set-up system. It's actually a great recording to show off a system with. If you don't mind that the disk is not gold, you can get a copy for around $22 also on Amazon.

Dafos IMHO has its most lasting quality in the cut with the crashing bass drum. When your system replicates the sound in one of the cuts on side two, I forget which, clearly for what it is, not just a big unmusical sound, you're well on your way to having, at a minimum, a system with excellent bass response.

Portishead "P." Levels too high, overdrives everything.

AFAIK, Portishead has not put out an album called "P" (I believe they've only released four full-length albums so far). There are no singles titled "P" either. Did you mean their latest album, "Third"?

Dafos IMHO has its most lasting quality in the cut with the crashing bass drum. When your system replicates the sound in one of the cuts on side two, I forget which, clearly for what it is, not just a big unmusical sound, you're well on your way to having, at a minimum, a system with excellent bass response.

I really don't listen to this recording that much, even though it is a superb recording the content is not exactly something I want to hear on a regular basis. Your comment got me listening to it on my main system again and I'm hearing it a different way - there are a few cuts that get pretty busy and dramatic and do test the system in a way that is more than just bass. Still, it's easy to be very impressed by this album on even a simple system. I think it has to do with the stark isolation of the sounds in many of the cuts, even those dramatic percussion cuts you reference. If the OP just wants albums to test bass abilities there are quite a few others as well, but that's only one measure of a system's abilities. Plenty of threads on that too. I guess in relation to the OP's impressions of the 1812 and Nutcracker the suggestion is a very good one as the impact of percussion cuts on Dafos have a very similar effect. Still, I think there's far more to a good system than being knocked back in your seat by convincing bass reproduction (though I must admit, I do enjoy that quality as well).

Eric Kunzel's Roundup on Telarc has twelve real gunshots in succession. Enjoy.