Are you a tone guy or a details-retrieval guy?

I don't settle for anything but both! A crazy little thing I call 'accuracy'.

 

I know what it is. Prat in the UK however...

 

Is that right. I cannot seem to get along with horns (or single driver). They seem to be missing such much of the top octaves, and always seem to have a "cupped hands" sound to them. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Judd

 

I'm a detail guy, but if it doesn't sound musical it's a waste of time.

 

neither- i'm a "natural" guy. the more close the sound is to natural, true to life, live in your room the more i like it. an appropriate, natural amount of detail with correct voicing and timbre.

 

Natural to me is tone. Every individual instrument has unmistakeable tone. Even two guitars, same make, same year, are easily distinguished by their unique tone.

 

This isn't a horn system in the old fashioned sense, it's a constant directivity horn (waveguide might be more appropriate) to control the off axis frequency response since we listen to the room as much as the speakers. You can read Earl Geddes papers if you want to know more. I am taking the concept quite a bit further, to get the high efficiency/Dynamics of bass horns where Earl is limited to what he can do with a commercial speaker.

Believe me I am not a fan of beaming audiophile round horn speakers stacked on top of each other either.

 

The term PRAT with regard to the reproduction of music originated in the UK - usually associated with Linn and Naim. It is also something that I believe is the first essential in being able to understand and appreciate a piece of music as a listener. I am continually amazed at the number of highly detailed stereo systems (usually digital) which actually can't reproduce a musical performance.

 

I think tone has only one definition --- timbre: those characteristics of harmonic content and of envelope (the attack, decay, sustain and release of a sound including it's changing harmonic content over that envelope) that make a trumpet playing A=440 Hz sound recognizably like a trumpet and a guitar playing A= 440 Hz sound recognizably like a guitar and allow us to tell one from the other. If two instruments play the same pitch at the same amplitude at the same time, if both of those instruments just produced pure sine waves with instant on and instant off characteristics, they'd sound identical to one another. But we can tell the trumpet from the guitar playing the same notes because each instrument has a different harmonic profile, a different attack rate and attack character (that "blatty" kind of trumpet attack being very distinct), etc. Those things are the elements of tone. Most gear will allow you to at least distinguish instruments from one another at a baseline level (though some gear playing dense passages with similar instruments might sound "confused"), but some gear will capture those elements of timbre with a greater sense of tactile realism than another.

Detail to me has little to do with that. Detail is the ability to resolve low level information. So, like, the sound of the flautist taking a breath that 10 dB or more below the average music level, the sound of the ambient reverb from the back wall of an orchestral stage, the sound of the valves flapping on a saxophone, the people talking in the audience and the coins dropping on the tables on the '61 Bill Evans Vanguard recordings, etc. A lot of it is kind of extra-musical, although it's presence also can help impart an illusion of realism and presence, like when you hear the dampers and damper pedal moving around and Monk grunting on a great recording like Alone in San Francisco, it improves the illusion that Monk and the piano are present.

 

I actually think that once you mange to assemble a decent, average audio system, the biggest improvements to be gained relate to setup and room acoustics. If you're listening to speakers in an untreated room, and you haven't actually set up the listening position and speaker position and room treatments based on frequency response and energy-time curve measurements, with consideration for room modes and speaker-boundary interference and reinforcement, then you probably have enormous, gross frequency response anomalies -- 15, 20+ dB dips and peaks across broad chunks of the audio spectrum, especially in the bass and lower midrange -- the size of which you'd never tolerate in an amp or preamp or speakers or whatever. If you haven't paid close attention to the listening axis on both the vertical and horizontal planes you probably have some pretty off high frequency response at the listening position and maybe a big notch in the frequency response at the listening position in the range where the signal crosses over to the woofer, etc. To me almost any different between, say, speaker cables or tweaks, or hell, even DACs, pale in comparison to the enormous differences that result from moving speakers and listening position six inches, or untreated low frequency standing waves vs. treated low frequency standing waves.

But yeah, getting noise -- power supply noise, thermal noise, but also, especially with vinyl, mechanical noise like motor vibration and tone arm ringing modulating the signal being picked up by the cartridge -- lower and lower and lower, even if you don't hear it as noise until it's gone, always will improve low level detail. It's always a trade off, as everything is in audio or anything designed and build by man. But, yeah, it's amazing how much low level noise and ringing you don't always even know is there can mask detail in a home audio rig, which you only realize when its gone.

 

I'm aware of where it started, and what it means. And there's nothing out there yet that's convinced me otherwise that this is nothing but a joke.

 

Yes, and as stated earlier, I know what it means.

 

I'm a rock out with my PRAT out kind of guy.

 

Buying systems over too many years it has never been a distinction I have thought about, do I like this is all.
You would think my set up now would be all about tone, Koetsu, single ended tubes and Sonus-Faber but it's probably the most detailed system I have owned.

 

The fine details in music are often part of the background texture, and are not supposed to be heard, unless one do a dedicated attentive listening. Many "audiophile" gears and recordings articulates on the details, putting them in your face" and making them to dominate the music picture. Sometimes I like this, but in general it's more like listening to disjointed sounds, rather than music - it's enjoyable, but one misses the emotion and the original intention of a musical piece, IMO.

 

I'm a just 'play the music' kind of guy.

 

Come down to Seattle sometime. My system has achieved what I believe to be an great compromise between the these two parameters and has excellent PRaT as well.

 

It's like that old commercial, sometimes it's detail, sometimes it's tone - from a focus standpoint. Tone must always be right. Always.

 

I think it's real, but it's kind of hard to put one's finger on it. It's a subtle but unmistakable quality that is probably just emphasized more in some systems than others, by components that tend to focus on transients and dynamics over other elements in the music. Like I said, it's subtle. It's not like one system has it and another doesn't. Any audiophile system should have it and most probably do, it's just that some systems will emphasize it more than most and so those are the ones labelled as having PRaT. Like most things in this hobby, the differences tend to be exaggerated when they are described.

As for tone vs. detail, if one puts together a "high fidelity" system I would hope it does not compromise on either. And I think one can easily put together a system that does not. Hard to vote for either...it would be saying you could accept inaccurate sounding voices/instruments or that you could accept part of the music being buried.

That's a good description I think. I also think of it as the ability to follow the melodic line of each instrument at any given moment in time, with no loss of clarity amongst any of them. Despite what I said above about not needing to compromise, in my experience a lot of systems can struggle with this.