Ok, it’s like this thing and is associated with “toe tapping” and such. I confess, I don’t get it. Apparently companies like Linn and Naim get it, and I don’t and find it a bit frustrating. What am I missing? I’m a drummer and am as sensitive as anyone to timing and beats, so why don’t I perceive this PRaT thing that many of you obviously do and prize as it occurs in stereo systems? When I read many Brit reviews a lot of attention goes to “rhythm” and “timing” and it’s useless to me and I just don’t get it. If someone can give me a concrete example of what the hell I’m not getting I’d sincerely be most appreciative. To be clear, enough people I greatly respect consider it a thing so objectively speaking it’s either something I can’t hear or maybe just don’t care about — or both. Can someone finally define this “thing” for me cause I seriously wanna learn something I clearly don’t know or understand.
WhatHiFi is, IMO, one of the more reliable review sites and they devote a fair portion of every review talking about the equipment’s ability convey joy and rhythm, and generally a good musical experience. Nothing wrong with that.
@dogearedaudio Well, yeah nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t tell me squat about whether I wanna listen to a piece of gear or not. What HiFi sucks IMHO, and they don’t ever compare whatever equipment is under review to anything else. Why? Because they don’t wanna be held accountable like all the Brit mags. Useless. Utterly useless reviews.
If Etta makes you want to move , isn't that Prat and if it's just meh isn't that lack of PRat?
I suspect you're already PRaT maxed out. As a musician timing means something different than what it means to a typical listener. The beat is on the recording and unless you cassette player or vinyl speeds up and slows down the beat is the same no matter the system. From my perception of what is being described is more a leading edge dynamic artifact. When the stick hits the drum head it's more than a single event. Where you hit it, how much force, which drum and how the drum is tuned has a different level of priority to some. The same goes for stringed and wind instruments. The ability for your stereo to reproduce (enhance) aspects of the music affects the music's enjoyment factor. The same song can sound dull and lifeless or jaw dropping spectacular depending on both the system and your state of mind. There are times (usually late at night) where my stereo just sounds better than it did previously. Does that mean someone somewhere turned up the PRat or is that just an lack vocabulary to actually describe the many aspects that make up our hobby?
Well, your own system includes select cables, amp upgrades, and a lot of other refinements, so clearly you’ve spent some time developing a system that plays music the way you want to hear it. I assume you didn’t just close your eyes and grab whatever came to hand. If "PRAT" doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t. For a lot of audiophiles, especially people getting started in the hobby, it can be a helpful measure of where your money is best spent. WhatHiFi is, IMO, one of the more reliable review sites and they devote a fair portion of every review talking about the equipment’s ability convey joy and rhythm, and generally a good musical experience. Nothing wrong with that.
It's just a euphemism for something that simply sounds more authentic. Being more authentic gets you more involved with the sound and gets you to toe tapping.
I think the mystery behind it that we're looking at it with a modern perspective that can't understand why something so mid range centric as the Naim/Linn sound back in good old days can be called authentic when modern systems can beat them at that game.
Remember that the midrange accounts for about 80% and once they got that down convincingly, PRaT became a thing.
Practically all modern systems have the ability to sound pretty authentic but we still find PRaT to be elusive and that all boils down to the quality of the recording: how well it was done. Great sound in, great sound out.
@danager Great song. How does that tell me absolutely anything about PRaT??? My system sounds great playing that song so what EXACTLY makes a better PRaT system sound better doing that? I mean, as a drummer you’re either on the beat or you’re not. And I’ve not heard a system that’s “behind” the beat. You gotta come at me with more than a single song. I’m willing or learn, but this ain’t it.
I find it almost impossible to not become involved move and get excited by this song. How this differs from PRAT I guess is how the stereo displays it???
Well, if this thread has taught me anything it’s that this thing called PRaT is pretty indescribable in words and is just a “feel” thing I just apparently don’t — and probably never will — get or care about. I appreciate all your attempts to educate me, but I still just don’t get it. Music either sounds real to me or it doesn’t. Period. I just can’t relate that to timing, “pace” whatever the hell that is or “rhythm” whatever the hell that is. I think most famously Art Dudley used to focus on timing and beats, and I never got anything he was talking about and never got much from any of his reviews. Kind of like Herb Reichert or Sam Tellig — I like reading their prose but never, ever, get anything out of whether I wanna buy a component because they’re just too opaque. They write just to write for their own sake. It’s entertaining to read but ultimately not very useful IMHO. I could be wrong as usual, but what say you? I think this could be an interesting topic for further discussion.
I'm not sure what's so confusing about it. Audio systems are a combination of mechanical devices that work together to reproduce that elusive thing called music. There are well-made devices and badly-made devices. There are devices that work well together and devices that don't. A Chevy Geo isn't going to give you the same driving experience as a Ferrari. A speaker with woolly, sluggish bass and misaligned drivers isn't going to convey the speed and accuracy of your drumming very well, is it? Likewise, an amp with poor transient response is going to fail to do that. I'm sure you don't need to be told that pace, rhythm and timing are essential qualities in a good musical performance, whether it's a Haydn trio or a Steely Dan song. I think "PRAT" is just a short-hand way of saying that a certain piece of audio equipment, or a combination of them, conveys those qualities (or the lack of them) effectively. (AFAIC, not all the system PRAT in the world can make "Jazz at the Pawnshop" sound like an Eddie Condon group.) I think it's also a shorthand way of saying that a system conveys the emotional qualities of a performance. A system doesn't have to do EVERYTHING perfectly--any system is going to have limitations of some sort--but if it conveys the essentials it can still provide more enjoyment than a far more expensive and unwieldy system that doesn't.
I've been in this hobby a long time too, and I've heard systems that DON'T convey the joy of music. And if you've ever spent any time building your own amps, preamps or speakers, it's not difficult to understand how easy it is to get it wrong.
I have always fancied, however erroneously, that PRAT was often due to very slightly erratic timing which is why tube amps sometimes can be masters of PRAT perhaps because something in some tubes is faintly "off" timing wise. This in turn might create a sense of naturalness or "live" performance even if the tunes have been very precisely guided in the studio.
Sometimes PRAT can be that ineffable thing called "swing." SRV nearly always had it in his playing.
The Stones often made Pratty records perhaps because of their catch-as-catch-can recording practices.
While, in general, I don’t like McGowen’s PRaTel, he certainly acknowledges its existence in the video. So, I agree with him. What he doesn’t talk about is how to sense it. I think it is about the hardest of the attributes to sense (although once you finally get it, it is easy). He alludes to the symptoms of good PRaT, but not what it sounds like.
It is not like detail. In detail, to sense it you collapse your focus of attention to individual sounds with in the sound field… like the tick of a drumstick or a bowed violin and listen intensely. If you are concentrating on bass, you tend to open up your focus of attention because bass is less directional. PRaT is more a function of a very large part of the sound field. To sense it close your eyes and sense the draw or connection to the rhythm. For me, it all came to me at once when I was listening to a system with great PRaT and memories of auditions of several past systems that had emotionally tugged at me (syrupy tube systems) but were unappealing for other shortcomings. That is when it came together. It is like a gestalt attribute produced across the sound field and the symptoms of it are the foot tap and desire to move (if only in your head).
It can take a long time so sense it. Highly contrasting systems can really help. Audition a solid state Luxman / Magico system then a Conrad Johnson or VAC / Sonus Faber system. The former is virtually devoid of PRaT the latter very rich with it. A Pass / DynAudio system is likely to be in the middle.
I've always interpreted it as speed and clarity. The attack and decay of notes are distinct and on time. Some speakers excel at this. I'm less clear about what it means for electronics but I assume the electronics play a role in creating that.
I had a pair of speaker cables that seemed to slow the attack and it felt like notes were actually late in timing and decayed too soon. As soon as I changed cables, that disappeared.
I was a Linn/Naim devotee in the early 80's when my interest in home audio started. My dealer espoused the Linn/Naim credo: Source-first hierarchy, Garbage in/garbage out, single speaker listening rooms, "testing" components by toe tapping and humming the melody, etc. Of course, as my music interests changed, it was hard to hum and toe tap to Schoenberg, but I sort of got what they were saying.
I just started drum lessons again after taking 50 years off. When I was 13, it was a rock and roll backbeat that I was interested in. Now I want to swing my ride cymbals with dotted 8th's and feel the looser syncopated pulse. My drum teacher believes in the metronome, and also in ditching the metronome so you can feel the rhythm with your body.
I think that my Linn dealer used PRaT in that way: You'll know it when you feel it, and you'll feel it with us, and not with the other guys.
I was an art teacher most of my life, and we are always using metaphors and simile to describe the ineffable. I personally think that trying to describe the rhythmic qualities of electronic gear is like that. It points to something that may be important, but it remains out of reach.
Some guys may be conflating what is baked into/inherent to the track/recording itself (instruments, notes being played, etc) as aome accomplishment of their gear. Such a track may seem to have great prrrrrtttt on all kinds of equipment (because in reality it was Bonham making you feel that way).
Otherwise, and if the same track is compared on different equipment, some technical parameters can be attributed to this perception of prrrrrtttttt. On speakers...the stored energy graph can be an indicator, no huge phase shifts from crossover, etc....low power set is a prrrrttttt killer, etc
This perception also varies greatly from listener to listener and the type of music. Some guys may only listen to some sleepy boring gal whispering slowly for hours to a very slow boring string. There may not even be any percussion involved. Such listeners may not think or need to care about prrrrtttt parameters.
@Soix - PRaT is what you get when you engineer a sound that is harmonically lean and emphasises the leading edge of the dynamic envelope. Being a drummer, unless you are a really bad drummer (which I'm sure you aren't), I'm no doubt you are perfectly capable of hearing this if you listen to the kinds of system's favoured by "PRaT" lovers. The term started to be used in the 1980's when Linn/Naim orthodoxy was at it's height in the UK. It started to fall away when a broader range of equipment started to be popular - most of it coming from the USA.
Away from the quasi cultist aspects of this, there is an underlying germ of truth in the sense that some components can be more coherent than others. However, that coherence is exhibited in the reproduction being full frequency and having a natural musical flow i.e. the system is expressing the recording and not superimposing a tailored sonic signature on it.
Thanks @soix, this is a bit of a mystery to me too, though I don’t doubt that it exists. Maybe it goes by other names, or feelings, when everything has that just right feeling.
I would avoid the boogie factor because, being a drummer, you probably have a name for that - triplet feel or whatever. I think the cleanest example would be to take two examples of the same song. One was mastered in the 80s as a bargain basement tape. The other was original - or a strong remaster later. The difference in how they make you feel - despite being the same exact music - is the PRaT. The haze or opaque blocking is removed. I generally put the effect in two groups - transients and bloom. How much definition is there between notes and how much strength is each note afforded. There’s a balance needed - and it changes for each recording.
I had no idea, so I Googled it. Found a lengthy explanation on the-ear.net, but I couldn't get through the article and stay awake. I need Cliffs Notes. Lol.
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