When you’re reviewing tons of headphones and IEMs throughout the year, chances are you’ve listened to some of the year’s best albums. It’s easy to rely on the test tracks that you’ve built up over time, but sometimes a new album can bring a fresh flavour to your headphone testing. Testing headphones properly isn’t just about throwing on a familiar track and listening for “detail.” In 2025, headphone design has become more sophisticated, with better driver control, wider staging, cleaner wireless codecs, and more aggressive tuning choices, meaning that the music you choose matters more than ever. The best headphone test albums aren’t just well-recorded; they’re revealing. They expose how a headphone handles space, dynamics, texture, and emotional weight across long listening sessions, not just flashy moments.
This guide focuses on modern, sonically ambitious albums from 2025 that reward careful listening. These are records built with depth, contrast, and intent—albums that challenge headphones to reproduce quiet nuance, explosive scale, and complex layering without collapsing or fatiguing the listener. Whether you’re evaluating a new audiophile open-back, a planar magnetic flagship, or a high-end pair of wireless headphones, these albums help you understand how your gear sounds, not just that it sounds good.
What makes a good album for headphone testing?
A great headphone test album does more than sound “clean.” It presents a wide range of sonic challenges that reveal how a headphone behaves across the full frequency spectrum and dynamic range. Strong candidates typically feature intentional spatial design, where instruments occupy clearly defined positions, allowing you to assess soundstage width, depth, and imaging precision. They also balance microdetail and macrodynamics—quiet passages with audible room tone, breath, or decay, followed by moments of impact that test driver control and composure.
Equally important is tonal honesty, especially in the midrange. Albums with exposed vocals, acoustic instruments, or natural reverbs make it immediately obvious when a headphone is too recessed, too forward, or artificially hyped. Finally, the best headphone-testing albums sustain this quality over time. They remain engaging during long listens, revealing fatigue, treble sharpness, bass bloom, or compression issues that short demo tracks often hide. In short, a good headphone test album doesn’t flatter your gear—it tells the truth, whether you’re ready to hear it or not.
1. Oneohtrix Point Never — Tranquilizer
“Tranquilizer,” by ambient electronic producer and composer Oneohtrix Point Never, is the most recent release, but I’ve been obsessing over it when testing headphones for some of my latest reviews. Built around a dense collage of library sounds, “Tranquilizer” blends airy ambience with ghosted vocals and cinematic instrumentals that constantly shift across a colorful aural field. Whether or not these fragmented textures sound coherent should help determine whether your headphones showcase good separation and layering ability.
I’ve heard this album over AirPods, and the mix appeared too crowded, omitting the blank space that enhances spaciousness and reveals noise floor perception. What makes Tranquilizer a consistently rewarding headphone to test your headphones with is listening to specific micro-samples appear and vanish throughout the mix. This will communicate to you how your headphones resolve, and how they’re perceived in their headspace. A hollow midrange will make itself known, as well as a peaky treble that will sound like papery fragments.
Recommended headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-M50x, Beyerdynamic DT 770, Beyerdynamic DT 990, Audio-Technica R70xa, HiFiMAN Edition XV, HiFiMAN Edition XS, Sivga P2 Pro, Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Meze 105 Silva, HiFiMAN Ananda, Meze 109 Pro, Dan Clark Audio Noire X, Dan Clark Audio Noire XO
2. Anna von Hausswolff — Iconoclasts
If you mainly listen to open-back headphones with big soundstages and instrumentation that appears grand and cinematic, Anna von Hausswolff’s “Iconoclasts” is a must listen. This combination of post-rock and neoclassical darkwave contains a scale of musicality that is cathedral-like in its presentation. The pipe organ is Anna’s primary instrument, which is already a unique and harmonically complex sound that can show you what your headphones can do. It also features tons of other sound elements like sweeping orchestral arrangements, synths, and brass sections like saxophones. This is a huge production that showcases massive dynamics with an incredible scale. All of these sounds should easily let you know if your headphones can reproduce height and tall instruments.
If you’re listening to Iconolasts and the stereo field feels like a flat plain that extends from the left channel to the right, then your headphones’ spatial imaging may not have much depth. Iconoclasts also test upper-midrange elements, such as glare control and reverb realism. This also extends to macrodynamics, where I would watch out for how your headphones handle the dense crescendos presented on this album. Sometimes, these performances can fall into a single body of solidified tone, but the right headphones will be able to reproduce these sections into clear layers.
Recommended Headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-M50x, Beyerdynamic DT 770, Beyerdynamic DT 990, HiFiMAN Edition XV, HiFiMAN Edition XS, Sivga P2 Pro, Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Meze 105 Silva, HiFiMAN Ananda, Meze 109 Pro, Audeze LCD-2, Audeze LCD-X
3. Rosalía — Lux
This is the closest 2025 gets to a modern pop reference record. Lux includes pop arrangements with orchestral sections and other avant-garde elements. All of these instruments dynamically contrast and create a unique sonic character that your headphones should paint with serene clarity. Rosalia’s vocals are Lux’s primary element, though, and they’ll be able to communicate to you what your headphones are truly capable of. Timbral accuracy in the upper-midrange is key, as vocals are extremely direct and transparent across most tracks. Headphones that lean neutral can really push those vocals forward for an even more lifelike presentation. If your headphones have a V-shaped profile that reduces midrange power, these vocals will sound weaker in comparison. Other sound testing elements include treble control that minimizes brittleness, and low-end articulation that folds bass layers underneath dense arrangements without bleed.
Recommended Headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-M50x, Beyerdynamic DT 770, Beyerdynamic DT 990, HiFiMAN Edition XV, HiFiMAN Edition XS, Grado SR225x, Grado SR325x, Sivga P2 Pro, Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Meze 105 Silva, HiFiMAN Ananda, Meze 109 Pro, Audeze LCD-2, Audeze LCD-X, Sennheiser HD 800, Dan Clark Noire XO
4. The Necks — Disquiet
This album can be considered quite daunting as a listening experience when you look at its length, but it contains rich sonic properties that make this album a no-brainer for headphone testing. What you’ll hear on this album is very precise instruments played in the style of free improvisational jazz, with some ambient design. Individual instruments appear very tactile and transparent throughout each track, backed by natural room ambience for a real in-studio feel. This would make studio headphones a perfect fit for listening to Disquiet. They would certainly localize these instruments very easily, and with the level of spatial depth that does the production of the album justice.
Other audiophile headphones will really unveil low-level detail and grain. Your headphones will need to have a good resposne to decay, as Disquiet features resonant tails that taper off ethereally. With that said, I find that headphones that are too airy make the instruments float around a little too much. Studio headphones will have a better time anchoring these instruments within the soundfield.
Recommended Headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-M50x, Beyerdynamic DT 770, Beyerdynamic DT 990, HiFiMAN Edition XV, HiFiMAN Edition XS, Sivga P2 Pro, Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Grado RS2x, Meze 105 Silva, HiFiMAN Ananda, Meze 109 Pro, Audeze LCD-2, Audeze LCD-X, Sennheiser HD 800, Focal Clear MG
5. Racing Mount Pleasant — Racing Mount Pleasant
This chamber rock record is a gift for testing midrange realism and organic layering: strings, horns, woodwinds, and ensemble arrangements that can sound either gorgeously dimensional or like a congested blob, depending on your headphone’s tuning and staging. This kind of ensemble recording is great for testing spatial imaging that stacks layers of sound from back to front. It will also highlight the space between each instrument, where headphones with a narrow soundstage will struggle to reproduce the record’s sense of lift.
Recommended Headphones: Beyerdynamic DT 770, Beyerdynamic DT 990, HiFiMAN Edition XV, HiFiMAN Edition XS, Sivga P2 Pro, Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Grado RS2x, Meze 105 Silva, HiFiMAN Ananda, Beyerdynamic DT 1770 MKII, Beyerdynamic DT 1990 MKII, Meze 109 Pro, Audeze LCD-2, Audeze LCD-X, Sennheiser HD 800, Focal Clear MG
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