A few weeks back, Dr. Sean Olive, longtime director of acoustic research and now senior fellow at Harman International and former president of the Audio Engineering Society, paid homage to one of the most enduring audiophile test tracks, just over 35 years after its original release, with a LinkedIn post that went something like this:

Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was one of the original tracks we used to test loudspeakers at the National Research Council of Canada in 1988, and we continue to use it today at Harman. Why? Because it’s one of the most sensitive test signals to hear problems in loudspeakers and headphones. It consistently produces the largest effect size and F-statistics in listener training and product benchmarking tests on headphones and loudspeakers, meaning that listeners can clearly hear and discriminate between the products and formulate strong preferences when using “Fast Car.”