This is funny me and Mac were just talking about this same subject...
I have a pair of songs that I like to use, my demo playlist has 40+ song sin it but the first 2 tell me a lot and fast... both most people have been listening to for 30 or so years so will be very familiar, which is what you want, how can you compare a speaker how everything else sounds with a material you don't know very well?
#1 Arrowsmiths "Janies got a gun", that fast rise and collapse percussion tells a lot, the whispers that a good speaker shows detail in and your brain doesnt have to fill in the gaps... You will also hear some breaths that other systems won't pick up, but for some reason this differs on different recordings, I have 2 cd's one was an old one and one was never and on the newer one the breaths were gone, so someone either remastered it and removed them or Steven Tyler stopped breathing and they were totally rerecorded... Not sure?
#2 Stealers Wheel "stuck in the middle with you", the hand clapping should be rite there just a level or 2 under the vocals, you can hear Joe Egan take a big breath before the "pleeeeeaaaseee" part on lesser systems you will just hear eeeeeeeiiieeeeiiee I lot of people hear this song on my music only system and say "he is saying "please"", lol with a good system you will hear the breath before, the "Pa" then the leeaeeeeae" and then the "se" so instead of eeeeeeeeieeiee you get paleeaaaeeaase... Its hard to explain and I probably did a horrible job of it, but if you hear it you will get it.. This song separates the good from the really good IMO, you should be able to tell something weird is going on with the strings too, they are actually playing with a beer bottle, wiping the strings with it and bouncing it up and down, you pick this up with a well balanced detailed speaker...
Play some songs you are super familiar with and see if you can find some detail that prior to your new system you never picked up... if its not there, then you either are very used to nice music systems or what you have is just ok. I am not crazy about yamaha speakers and to catch the details I am talking about in the above two songs you need some decent equipment or really good ears, but you should pick up on something, kind of how you just know when you have a special speaker...
