"Pace", it's importance for enjoyment?

Coming from you, that's a compliment Snook.

Lack of PRAT is what leads to dissatisfied audiophiles. Seeking more detail, more bass, more soundstage, smoother highs, all that stuff, would not drive us to distraction so much if our systems could just "boogie down" regardless of that other stuff - the music would take over.

I believe all components can affect PRAT, as can the quality of the power coming through the wall. There are lots of components that exhibit good PRAT, but much more that don't and so it is just a matter of learning to listen for it.

Dekay raises a very important point as regards vibration. Poor vibration isolation will mean the structure stores energy and releases it slowly, cuasing a smearing of impulses in the time domain. This can destroy PRAT, because our sense of PRAT is incredibly sensitive to very small errors in timing cues.

I have no idea really, but suspect that the PRAT issues with digital are more likely due to phase errors caused in DACs and digital filters than by jitter errors, but that jitter errors can also have an effect, particularly in the rhythmic cues in the upper bass.

If you have ever fiddled with your system and finally hit that point where you feel you have lots of detail, neutrality, dynamics and a decent soundstage - only to find the result boring. Then you have probably not attended to the PRAT issue.

Hi Yoh. We may of course be talking at cross-purposes, and you mean something different when you say pace. Your last post suggests to me that you mean a wider issue of "musicality", which I suggest includes PRAT, but also includes smoothness and naturalness.

But I would like to point out that there are PRAT differences between analogue front ends too.

One famous example was a dozen or so years ago when TAS Editor Harry Pearson raved about the sound of the new SOTA turntable and its virtues over the Linn LP12. It took him some years to realise his mistake and re-rate the Linn highly. He did so when he "discovered" the concept of transparency, but some of us felt he finally discovered pace. The LP12 had vastly better pace than the SOTA and was much more fun to listen to - albeit with a mid-bass hump and weak bottom octave. Harry's mantra had led him down a blind alley.

Arguably the superior pace, but poorer bass performance could be attributed to the much flimsier engineering in the LP12. While the engineering of the SOTA was more impressive, its structure stored too much energy. This is not to say the LP12 was perfect - it could have done with more rigid chassis and sub-chassis - but it was at least light. Some turntables today still suffer from the "more mass is better" approach.

There are also PRAT differences between CD technologies. Some still swear that the best PRAT from CDs comes from the simplest technology in some of the earliest players - the 16 bit, non-over-sampled players. Have a look at the Sakura Systems DAC as an example (kind of) of this.

I can't help but be struck by the variance in definition of PRAT. For me it is about how notes start and stop. If I could simplify for a moment and refer to a note in three parts - its attack, its body and its decay. A system with poor pacing has one or other of two problems. The first is the sense that the start of a note is slow - ie. there is a lack of attack. The second is that the body of the note seems to start before the attack - of course this is nonsense, but it is a feeling that is real and I have experienced it - a feeling that the note is there before the initial attack, but clearly just the ear/brain getting confused for some reason. Rhythm is what you feel, the sense of the music bouncing along, or a sense of swing - you either feel it or you don't. Timing is about events like cymbal taps and bass strings being plucked occurring in a way that indicates the players do actually know how to play together in the same groove. A system's timing is good when the instrumentalists seem to be playing well together.

I suspect the three different concepts are all just about the same issue - reproducing the sounds with no time-based smearing of the sounds - thereby leaving all the timing clues, that are critical to feeling immersed in the music (as opposed to just the sound), intact.

One of the telling things to try is to listen to some music on your system, and then on a really cheap system - like your son's boom-box - and just try sinking into the music rather than the sound. What can be startling is that some transistor radios have better PRAT than some very high-end systems. One might postulate that the great PRAT of the transistor radio is due to its simplicity.

Some very good points are emerging now, or at least headed in the right direction in my opinion. Such as the observation that mini-monitors tend to have good PRAT (small rigid cabinets not storing much energy). I will just add one observation.

To get between the transistor radio and the sound of the real thing, there seem to be two divergent paths (probably many more, but I am simplifying in order to make a point).

One path is the PRAT path. The gear that follows that path is exemplified by Naim and Linn. Their low-end gear appears brash and fatiguing, but manages to maintain a decent sense of the PRAT in the original performance (systems with good PRAT only have it with suitable recordings of good musicians).

The other path goes the "sound" route trying to make the sounds close to the sound of the real thing, but sometimes embellishing a wee bit to cover over the deficiencies - with the emphasis being on tonality and dynamics. The problem with this second path is that with modest systems PRAT is usually very poor and music becomes boring quickly.

At the top end of the Naim-type gear and the top end of the "sound" route the paths converge again. The reason for this, I theorise, is that the objectives are now being met by both "schools" through sheer accuracy of resolution of detail and elimination of smearing, while maintaining dynamics.

The paths in between merely make different compromises. I agree with Dan that the transistor radio is distorted, and that low-end systems with good PRAT tend to emphasise transients in a certain way - thereby looking after rhythmic cues better than they look after tonality. But the rhythm in the music is not created by distortion. You can still hear the difference between a group that is "cooking" and one that is not. The issue is that a certain kind of compromise is being made.

Ken, I probably made a pig's ear in attempting to describe the separate issues of pace, rhythm and timing and so please correct me where I was wrong. Personally I do not listen for those three things independently. But, as stated before, when I evaluate a component I do not tend to objectify the sound in the way that Harry Pearson does, except initially in order to identify "sound" issues that may become annoying over the long term. My final decisions are made by forgetting the objective stuff and just seeing if I am swept away by the music.

Whinee!!!