What exactly is PRaT???

It seems just as subjective as anything in this hobby.

I keep reading words like transient response, time aligned drivers, authenticity, musicality to describe PRaT. Why not just use those words rather than some esoteric acronym? It also seems to be as much a property of the music itself as the system on which it is being played and the listeners connection to the music. It seems to me that any system can be regarded as having these elements if it’s engaging and musical to the person who put it together. So far no one has been able to give a reasonable objective definition of it that folks agree upon and makes sense to the folks trying to understand which says to me that no one really knows what it is.

That Chris Rea song is garbage. Hard to find PRaT in garbage. It’s got everything that made music suck in the 80s. Bombino is a better example. It still seems like no one can come up with a definition but plenty of examples of what they think it is. Seems like it’s more a quality of the song and whether the system can reproduce those qualities. If that’s the case then shouldn’t there be some way to quantify what makes the system do that? Whether it’s transients or decay or midrange quality or phase coherent drivers or even room treatments.  Basically something like if you want a system that can reproduce PRaT then it needs these n number of qualities.

PRaT seems like the pornography of the audio world, I can’t define it but I know it when I hear it.

This Hendrix song has it in spades, at least for me

https://youtu.be/wtveDXqvdL8?si=Rx_jL3NnJ5h7l4qe