What do audiophiles mean when they talk about Pace, Rhythm & Timing?

We do know that nearly every component
in some way will alter the sound.

 

If you find yourself tapping your foot to the music, the system has good PRaT

 

I don't mean that. But something is seriously wrong if the pace or timing changes--could be a bad turntable belt/motor or CD motor. I'm thinking in musician's terms, not some abstract audio definition.

 

My Ford Transit van FM radio must be NAIM-quality

 

Wow..really? Best reproduction of acoustic or electric bass I've heard has been from planars. Not talking crank it up or flap your pant legs bass, just nod your head, tap your foot emotional connection bass.

 

Ok. Thanks for enlightening me...

 

@missan beat me to it, but, to some degree, every piece of equipment alters the sound.

Good to see that this is as controversial, as it was 40 odd years ago!

If we did have a system that was 100% accurate, it wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority, didn't like it. In demonstrations, not everyone enjoys the extra dynamics, detail and extra, tighter, bass extension of an active system, some prefer the "warmth", of the ill-defined, less tuneful bass

If you threw away every piece of equipment, that altered the sound, excepting the over supply that got dumped in the sea, all those years ago, we would quickly fill those land fill sites! What a waste of all those slightly different "sounding" valves.....

I can't answer what happens in a Hi-Fi demonstration these days, but 20-30 years ago, 100s of demonstrations were taking place daily, where the ability of a component, to mess up the musical performance, were being heard, to lesser or greater degrees.

As for Pace, Rhythm & Timing, even in one manufacturer's range, small differences can be heard. It is very much up to individual, how important this is, but certainly helps explain, people's widely differing preferences.

I'll retreat now.

 

If you're tapping your foot to Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field then there is something very seriously wrong with either your audio gear or your hearing.

 

re. the previous post:

 

Perhaps it has better PRaT than some very expensive systems?

 

Not in terms of speed.

 

I want a pair of magical speakers that produces sound waves in the same manner as a whole ensemble instruments into free air.

 

Not in terms of speakers that are "trying" (key word here) to produce bass of a real instrument into free air.

 

In order not to allow me using the expression "monkey talk", please just name one bass player using a planar speaker to record his instrument.

 

True, however, many microphones do use Mylar diaphragms.

I'm not saying planars are superior, just that they produce bass in a different way, whether it's more or less accurate compared to the original recording....

 

This nails it.

If you also play air guitar and drums you have PRaT in spades.

 

So PRaT is a function of the type of music you listen to. I don't get PRaT out of my gear because I listen to string quartets and Bach cantatas?

 

This is about his most rhythmic piece, based on the heartbeat and breath. Their is not much haze in this, get stoned and move your feet to your heart. Breath slowly and get lost.

 

The leading edge of a note, plus the decay is the most important parts of string quartet playing, it is stripped bare in recordings with just four instruments, a bigger reason for good PrAT I can not think of.

 

Everyone knows that fast running turntables have the best PR&T !
But seriously there do seem to be certain components in the "chain" that are better at keeping up with the timing of the music than others- all else being equal. IMHO it has to do with that instant, abrupt, split second burst of a note or transient that when effectively reproduced sounds more like live music or live sound. The component's contribution sounds more "lively".
Everything in the chain, from recording to source to amplification to speaker to listening environment can have an impact on this quality.

 

I'm with the OP. Pace and rhythm are elements of musical performance. Electronic equipment doesn't have those characteristics. Any reviewer who ascribes pace and rhythm to a piece of audio gear is anthropomorphizing the gear, and falling into a cliched, not terribly descriptive short-hand.

If Joe Schmoe is assigned to review a piece of gear and when he listens to one piece of gear he finds himself tapping his toes more than when he listens to the same recording with another piece of gear, for us to know if that has to do with anything other than the mood of the reviewer at the moment, he really needs explore why -- what is it that X is doing that Y is not that results in that musical experience -- is it a different handling of transients? A lower noise floor? Less (or more) overhanging or ringing at one frequency or another? Tell me something useful about what the gear actually does and can do, not whether or not you tapped your toes. The cause of that could have been anything -- your mood, the drink in your had, that you have the volume a little louder than before.

Stuff like PRaT -- the ease with which reviewers fall back on these kinds of audiophile cliches and the focus on their own emotional listening reflexes vs. actually examining what the gear is doing -- is what led me to stop reading audio reviews all together years ago.

Timing -- audio gear has timing -- whether its phono carts or speakers or electronics, you can look at response rates and decay rates and phase coherence and these kinds of things that are matters of timing -- how fast something responds to the signal, how coherently the different parts of the system respond to the signal. But don't think when audio reviewers fall back on the notion of PRaT, they're usually talking about these characteristics. And if they are, they should just tell us that. That we can understand with specificity. Toe-tappingness, which seems to be the only definition of PRaT, is in the mind of the behearer. It's not a characteristic of the gear. And it may be an experience one person has with X piece of gear that another person doesn't.

 

I think you're doing a handstand, it's the equipment which convey what the musicians are doing, some people would say it's got PRAT

 

I don't believes so, if the bass player his doing complex and fast playing the amp has to be able to cope with fast transients. Plug in a very good sub and you should hear it no problem.

 

P,R,A, and T is musicality instead of detail extremes. To sum it up simply. I prefer musicality to detail extremes.

 

The term "musicality" used as a characteristic of audio gear is even way more ridiculous than PRaT, IMHO.

If anything, musicality is a characteristic of a highly talented musician performing with heart and soul and has nothing to do with electronic hardware whatsoever.