Is the sine sweep at track #18 on Highway One meant to be a steady(perfect) progressive sweep or does it dip and waver a bit?
Are these imperfections that I hear dips and peaks in the frequency response of my system caused by reflections and cancellation?
If so, this track is very revealing.
Looks like I've got a lot of work to do before I enter it in a sound off.

i'm quite sure (I've only listened to it twice) that being a sine sweep it is obviously meant to be progressive.

It might be beneficial to grab the My Disc Autosound 2000 CD and use that to evaluate your system. There's a sine sweep track in that CD that's warbled to avoid standing waves and can give you an indication of the overall system frequency response. I think with pure sine sweep it is used to evaluate components electronically, not acoustically.

Cheers,

Bon

They call it a resonance test. It certainly made a few things rattle and vibrate but I was surprised how much the volume dipped and rose at various frequencies. It sounded like it was going in and out of phase.

Even on the best sound quality systems, those types of tracks sound like that. It doesnt mean your system is no good.
best thing to do is to try and test your system via pink noise and RTA. Thats the best way to get an idea of your systems curve.

If you don't have access to a RTA, you can still do it with a spl meter. Again, use a test disc with individual test tones, usually set at 1/3 octaves (31 test tones in all). Then you simply play each tone one after the other, record the spl of each tone then you can manually plot your systems freq curve as a bar graph. Takes a long time to do, hence why the RTA is better. Its much quicker!