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

I think a few posters in this thread have shown why PRaT is actually a real thing in regards to audio playback. It has objective measures (indirectly)...slew rate, phase coherence, system resonances, etc. all affect PRaT. Whether audio reviewers use the term with these measures in mind or not, I'm not sure it matters. They don't of course, probably because they are not equipped to measure those things in most cases. But perhaps they can hear the effect of these things, making their opinions no less accurate.

That's not really why I say it doesn't matter though. Whether a review leans to the objective or subjective side of the fence, you pretty much have to try for yourself no matter what a review says. Measurements are great - they can help with system matching and narrowing things down, and I definitely think more emphasis should be put on doing them. But I don't believe that anyone can look at measurements and know from that whether they will like a particular component when it's used in their system. In that respect it's basically just another opinion...a more informed one perhaps, but basically still a guess.

We can look at these things that can be measured and based on them estimate that System A will have a better sense of PRaT than System B. If the listener disagrees then the measurements are likely not all that is at play. If the listener agrees then the measurements could be accurate predictors of PRaT or maybe again they are only part of the story. But either way, what the listener likes to listen to most will be what dictates what they will want to own. We don't listen to measurements.

 

Throughout my 15 years selling Hi-Fi, I always stocked and sold Rega and Linn turntables.

As most people know, most Regas run slightly fast, LP12s were adjusted so not to run fast. Out of hundreds of demonstrations, not one person preferred the Rega, and literally two customers commented about the speed. One was a classical musician. blessed / cursed with perfect pitch. I believe most people will not notice 2-3% speed variation, but they will notice speed / pitch instability. Most turntables have far worse faults than running marginally fast or slow.

So which turntable had the better "PRaT", which was more "musical", which was more "tuneful". Every dem, not one person preferred the faster running Rega.

The best strobe disc I had, which was perfectly flat, and the hole was actually, bang in the middle (highly unusual!!), you could adjust a LP12 so the division lines were static - I believe these were 0.3% per second.

As for PRaT, Linn dealers used the "tune dem" to both position speakers, and compare equipment. Which rendition was more predictable, for basically pitch and timing. Could the majority of customers notice these "musical" differences? Yes, easily over 50%. Some preferred the larger than life presentation, that some equipment can give.

Can Hi-Fi equipment muck up the pitch and timing of music? Certainly 20 years ago, more customers than not, that I demonstrated equipment to, believed so.

Going back a generation, before game consoles, and movies became more important to play through the system rather than CD players or turntables, this was my observation from all the installations, I performed:-

Those who bought the Hi-Fi, flavour of the month type system, got off on a limited range of music, which showed off the system. Six months later, they would still have the same 20-30 pieces of music, when they wanted to hear the latest, magazine endorsed (heavily advertised..) cables. "I'm hearing a slightly nasal, colouration, and feel I could get more depth, with these cables".

Those who bought the "tuneful" system, had got into classical, jazz, expanded their collection, and spent many hours, each day enjoying - music.

Maybe we simply didn't get all the magazine waving, next best thing, customers. Certainly spent a fortune advertising in them!

Times may have changed, and each to their own, and it is still extremely difficult to describe sound. Is two pages of poetry, which nobody can understand, including probably the author, actually anymore useful and descriptive, than, I connected component A, and it made the piano sound out of tune?

Can we measure everything? Before working in Hi-Fi, I calibrated test equipment. Even though we were calibrating equipment for military use, and we knew what to measure, our reference equipment, simply wasn't good enough.

Manufacturers will measure equipment, but are they measuring the right parameters, and is their test equipment good enough?

We are blessed with pretty good measuring devices, namely our ears. Might not be perfect, but it's good to keep them satisfied!

Happy listening.

 

You've failed to mention, the trip to Glasgow, the lost time and the scar left on your temple.

 

It may interest people to talk about brush strokes but much more satisfying to step back and enjoy the results. I'm still coming back to an understanding and shared lexicon of words.

If you're reading this your system is probably doing what I understand as PRAT, I just need to convince you.

 

Yes, never mention Glasgow, especially not 257 Drakemire Drive or Eaglesham. Salisbury, Huntington and even Denmark are all places that cannot be trusted!

Because of the resonances of the speaker in a digital watch, these should be removed from the listening room. Of course a better sound will occur, if both ear cavities are covered.....

The real reason that modern Hi-Fi loses PRaT, isn't the equipment, but the large number of mobile phones and tablets in the listening environment!

I wonder if Hi-Fi dealers, magazines and indeed customers, have so much fun these days?

 

Actually I don't think anyone has shown any connection between PRaT and any of those measurable things.

In order to show such a connection, you'd have to find all these instances where reviewers used PRaT as a description and then test the piece of equipment reviewers describe has having better or worse PRaT, for all those things you mention, and see if there's a correlation between the measured attributes and the reviewers' perception of toe-tappingness.

No one has done that. People have just taken guesses at what actual characteristics of electronic might contribute to a reviewer's sense of PRaT , but it's just a bunch of spitballing. We don't know really what a person is taking about when they say X has better PRaT than Y, other than known that when a reviewer was listening to X he felt like bopping along to the music.

My personally guess is that whatever makes that happen to a listener at that particular time with that particular piece of gear listening to that particular piece of music is almost entirely between the ears of the listener. It's a psychological effect, not a characteristic of audio gear. Sometimes I find myself bopping along to a piece of music on the car radio, or playing back on my laptop from YouTube or on my big stereo; and sometimes, I don't. I don't think it's the equipment that's doing that. It's the circumstances of my mental state and what music is playing when. It happens with all kinds of different equipment at all kinds of different times, gear has nothing to do with it.

In the case of turntables, one could say definitively that rotational speed and rotational stability could audibly impact the "pace" and "timing" of the musical performance being played back. Certainly speed variations in turntables or tape decks can literally affect the tempo of the music they're playing back -- making the overall tempo (which is the only think I know the "pace" of music to mean, tempo) faster or slower, or causing perceptible tempo variations (given the way those devices work there would also be pitch variations going along with that), that could effect the timing of the musical performance we're listening too. But no other gear in the audio repro chain is going to have that kind of impact on the tempo or rhythm of the music being played back. And nowadays pretty much every turntable review comes with some user test for speed accuracy and stability, so we don't need to rely on PRaT for a reviewer to tell us that.

Outside of turntable or table deck rotational speed, nothing else in a hifi repro chain is literally affecting the tempo or tempo stability (i.e., the pace and the timing) of the music being played back. So, whatever reviewers are talking about when they mention the PRaT of a piece of gear, probably has nothing literally to do with it's ability to reproduce the recorded tempo and musical duration relationships. That's why the answer to the OP's title question remains so elusive....outside of turntable or tape rotational speed, there's nothing in the repro chain affecting the pace or rhythm of the music being played back, so whatever reviewers are talking about it's not literally the music's pace or rhythm.

 

Looking at the components that were popular with the Flat Earth crowd when PRAT became "a thing" - the preferred speakers were made by Linn, which all featured sealed enclosures, required placement against the wall because they had no baffle step compensation, and tended to have honky or quacky mids. For electronics they liked Naim amplification, which featured circuits out of a 1971 RCA transistor manual, along with oversized power supplies and a liberal sprinkling of tantalum electrolytic coupling capacitors. The result was a sound with rubbery, over-taut bass, a certain midrange push, and a character that emphasized the leading edge of transients at the expense of attenuating the resonant and acoustic signature of instruments and recording spaces.

 

HQROM
honky
quacky
rubbery
over-taut bass
midrange push

I understand now

 

I never hear all these vague terms used in person or in real life.
Only read bout them in audio reviews mostly.

 

Well, they are ways of describing how reproduced sound differs from reality...

 

You don't know enough sad people, that's all.

 

Well, how many conversations do you have with people who are trying to describe sound in words? It's not something we usually do, but it's something audio reviewers have to do and it's not that easy so we inevitably wind up with metaphors or language borrowed from other senses -- things are bright, or dark, or warm, or glassy, or whatever. It's not an easy chore.

 

To put a time scale on this, Linn introduced their first amp in 1985.

The Linn Kan, was upgraded to Kan ll in 1989. Still designed to go close to a wall, but had a stepped baffle.

The Linn Sara, was discontinued in 1989. This was "replaced" by the Kaber, designed to work in free air.

The Linn Isobarik replacement, the Keltik, again designed to work in free air, was introduced at end of 1991.

I'll leave it to others to decide if the speakers still liked Naim amps, and still honked and quaked, but this is 26 odd years ago, yet PRaT is still mentioned in reviews. Linn have used switch mode power supplies, since 1993 for pre-amps and 2001 for power amps. No more over-sized transformers, but PRaT and "tunes" still mentioned in reviews.

What does it mean?

 

Guess my Kans and Kan IIs were faulty, as not one person who heard them, ever described them using any of those terms. I feel I've lost out.

 

Uh, baffle step compensation has nothing to do with "a stepped baffle".

 

A few now and then, but honestly not a lot.
But still none use those odd terms, usually I tend to hear..."Perfect", "There ya go", "Needs a bit more bass/less treble"
Things that make sense in person maybe.

Maybe I am more used to a more technical descriptions also.
Such as dispersion, distortion, frequencies that are attenuated or boosted and so on.

 

Tue, my error. Thanks for reading, and correction.

 

Found this in line, so simply copied and pasted, enjoy!

Here's some explanation on PRaT, found on google

PRaT:
What is it?
Do you want it?
have you got it?
or, are you one?
Product: All audio products, including sources, amplifiers, loudspeakers and your ear-brain interface
Price: your enjoyment of music
Mains spur & leads: possibly but unlikely
Support/Feet: oh yes, even these
Hypothesiser: Mark Wheeler - TNT UK
Typed: Summer 2008


I was first introduced to the idea of PRaT in about '74 in a long established hifi shop where I'd hang out after school or on a Saturday playing with new stock, presumably tolerated by the proprietor as a future customer or future employee. Here I met a representative of a company I'd only vaguely noticed 'cos they'd had a mention in a SME (Plinth System 2000) advert in HiFi News. The company was Linn Products and the Scottish bloke (possibly Michael Something? can any Linnies elucidate?) was in the process of convincing the proprietor of this shop that he should add the Linn Sondek LP12 to the shop's roster of turntables, that already included similar looking subchassis examples like Thorens and AR. This is the same Sottish bloke who first introduced 2 callow schoolboys to the concept of 'PRaT'.

I don't recall if the actual term 'PRaT' was used on this occasion, but its elements were described and emphasised. Those elements were among many in the Pantheon of musicality Gods worshipped that day, in direct contradiction to the pseudoscientific objectivity of the hi-fi comics of the day.

As an English teenage boy at an all male school, I was no stranger to b*llsh*t:. Let's face it, at my school everyone claimed to have seen top bands live, claimed to have tried drugs and claimed to have enjoyed sexual encounters at the nearby girls' skool, and these activities were obviously the products of fertile imaginations rather than fertile loins. Hence, the hyperbole expounded in this Scotsman's refreshingly original sales-line was equally obvious.

However, some of what he said also fitted our experience of audio experiments better than the pseudoscience of 70s comics HiFi News and HiFi Sound. We 15 year-old audio-neophytes did recognise some of the arguments put forward as being grounded in the familiar skool physics curriculum, like simple Newtonian mechanics etc. However, we also recognised some of the early LP12 sales pitch as being way out there and I do recall a moment when my friend Roy & I were deliberately out-bulling the rep to encourage him to excel himself with his claims for what we thought looked like a one-speed Thorens TD150. This poor chap's claims about coefficients of expansion of aluminium, steel and rubber being considered to ensure speed stability at all operating temperatures are sadly the reason I can still remember the event.

On the other hand, we were seduced by the idea that we were in at the cutting edge, the start of something new that the magazines did not yet acknowledge. These ideas may become established wisdom, a metanarrative for which we could claim early insight. As youngsters we were sufficiently encouraged by the attention paid to our opinions by an audio professional, and sufficiently open-minded, to share with him our own experiments (unheard of in the UK audio press then) of cable experiments (with 6mm^2 mains cable and RF co-ax cable in both speaker and interconnect locations) and in return, he suggested to us, tricks for improving our own turntables (very-well-used Thorens TD150 and Transcriptors Saturn respectively, my Saturn having been bought for £15 not working) that we tried and heard improvements from this chap's suggestions. Ideas like removing the arm grommets from our SME3009/II-imp and early Hadcock Unipoise.

We took with us that man's suggestions to try felt turntable mats after Linn found that that the flat felt mat (offered for "tag cueing" in Linn's early brochures) outperformed the original conventional ribbed rubber mat. Thus my friend Roy tried felt mats and plain rubber mats against the standard lumpy rubber mat of the Thorens TD150. I had a perspex disc cut to cover the 5 rubber nipples of my Transcriptor Saturn platter. I tried this with a felt mat, no mat, a standard dimpled turntable mat and a thin sheet of plain rubber. In all cases we could hear differences; which was heresy in those days in Britain. In those days in Britain folk were burnt at the stake of a soldering-iron tip for suggesting anything mattered in turntables except rumble and wow & flutter.

So musicality, Linn and the PRaT argument had some credence for me and my circle of music & audio freaks in that adolescent time of fanatical enthusiasm, but what did it mean?

During the years 1974-1978 I heard the term PRaT defined in a variety of ways by various shop sales-people, manufacturer distribution representatives or hifi journalists. In the earliest days only the folk involved, one way or another, with Linn or Naim (or latterly, Pink Triangle or Exposure) mentioned the elusive and as yet unmeasurable parameters involved in PRaT, which was obviously an acronym...
so what does the 'P' stand for?
Well now it is universally accepted to represent
P for PACE,
but back in the day it was also described as
P for PITCH.

Linn made much of the ability of their turntable (then their sole audio product, although their reps described an experimental loudspeaker that turned out to be the 'brik) to maintain accurate pitch compared to their competition. One of their key claims to superiority over their many rivals was the capacity of a Linn LP12 to maintain better dynamic pitch stability, compared to other turntables of that period. They argued that during heavily modulated passages, the demand for more stylus deflection (to generate more electrical in the stylus/coil motor assembly of the cartridge) created more drag against the turntable platter rotation. So PITCH was a big deal at that time among that fraternity who would later be termed 'flat earth'.

We were all VERY aware of the limitations of hifi systems to portray pitch accurately; this was the period of audiocassette dominance in hifi shops. Even if I have never owned one outside of a car I have heard otherwise potentially capable audio systems in hifi shops demonstrated with the horrible output of a cassette player. No cassette-recorder less than a Nakamichi TriTracer700 or TT1000 ever managed pitch accuracy tolerable to anyone, particularly anyone who regularly heard a live piano, speshully the old Steinway evry morning in skool assembly. So while Pitch was a good starting point for the basics of audio reproduction it has now become universally usurped by Pace.

Now that Pace is the commonly used 'P' of the PRaT acronym, what does it mean? It refers to the speed at which a piece is played. It is the first piece of information we usually have after the title of a piece of music on a sheet of music. In the past, when sheet music outsold recordings and were the sales on which the music charts were based (and downloads are the most recent sales paradigm shift), the title might be followed by a descriptive clue to the rhythm and pace, for example "slow foxtrot" to indicate to players the speed of the dance and what dance steps the audience might hope to fit to the music. Speed is described first as "slow" and Rhythm next as "Foxtrot". On the example below, the mark showing crotchet=120 (quarter-note=120 in some cultures) indicates the engine speed of this piece. 120 refers to one-hundred and twenty beats-per-minute or 120bpm. This is a metronome marking so that players can set their metronome to that speed for practice. There are 4 crotchets (quarter-notes) in each bar in this time signature so that equates to 30 bars every minute; the bars are the vertical divisions across the stave.



The 'R' in PRaT seems to be the only umambiguous letter in this acronym. It is always described as 'Rhythm' so that's simple enough then, isn't it?
Sadly for the long suffering audiophile, it isn't.
Rhythm is what moves music along, it is the relationship with time that defines music as fundamentally different from other art forms like painting and sculpture. Rhythm is not musical speed, it is not the rate of progress but the relationship of successive notes and where the beat is emphasised.

The except from a transcription of the double-bass part from Ben E King's classic Stand By Me (which must be familiar to almost everyone in the Northern Hemisphere - hence its use here) clearly shows this. Unless otherwise instructed, the first note in any 4/4 time bar is the emphasised beat, the down-beat (the conductor will often bring the baton down for this beat), the kick-drum is often on this beat in rock tunes. In Stand by Me the dotted crotchet that opens each bar (the keynote A in the first bar) is emphasised. Because it is one-&-a-half beats long (that's what the dot after the note does, it adds 50% to whatever value the written note has) the following note has to be written a half-beat long (quaver or eighth-note), then tied to a crotchet to make it sound equal length to that opening note. This second sound in the bar does not start on the beat which is why it almost sounds like it hesitates when it is played. The rhythm is borrowed from the Cuban Rumba. The final beat in each bar is divided into two quavers (eighth-notes) to provide the spring back to the emphasised down-beat of the next bar. Ask many non-players to sing the bass riff of Stand by Me and they will start on the E that is the first quaver of the final beat of the first bar, but if the downbeat moves there all the danceable Cuban vitality falls away.

Some people are as impervious to rhythm as some people are to pitch (the latter are therefore referred to as 'tone deaf'). Rhythm awareness can be learned, which is why music teachers encourage pupils to clap in time to music. When I suffered a severe brain injury in 1998 I completely lost my awareness of time and my sense of rhythm; I couldn't tell a cd player from my Linn Sondek except by its tonality. At the time I was suffering from loss of income due to not being able to work and was forced to sell many of my possessions including my Linn that had lost its key feature to my ears. It was an interesting insight into the experience of others for whom rhythm is unimportant and demonstrated to me how timbre, tonal accuracy and low colouration become far more significant under such circumstances. The experience of listening to familiar music without a well developed sense of rhythm; I found that different recordings became my favourite daily plays. I practiced bass guitar to try to regain some of my sense of rhythm and timing as well as my left-right coordination. I am glad to say that I succeeded in recovering my sense of rhythm & time even if I didn't succeed in learning to play bass, but now I demand timbre, tonal accuracy and low colouration as well as PRaT. Tough. The search for the turntable that does both is still on.

The 'T' in PRaT was once defined to me as "Tune" by one dealer who would now be called a 'flat earther' who seemed to sell mainly Naim and Exposure amplifiers and Linn and Rega turntables. That dealer droned on about "tune following", the ability to separate out one instrument from an ensemble and follow its tune alone. He attributed this to British gear in his shop being better than expensive American imports at accurately resolving the components of tune, which seems to be more a matter of flag waving than listening. Naim dealers made much in their early days of this 'tune following' lark, that capacity of a system to allow the listener to pick out the tune being played by any one instrument in an ensemble and follow its tune alone.

However, nearly everyone else now uses the 'T' in PRaT to stand for 'Timing'. Timing is not the same thing as Rhythm or Pace, but it is related. Timing is the accuracy of reproduction of a wavefront comprising many frequencies. Hence a strike of stick on ride cymbal simultaneous with the other stick on the floor-tom should arrive at the hifi listener's ears in the same relationship as they would had the listener been sitting in front of the drum kit rather than their loudspeakers. The most sinful adulterers of timing tend to be multi-way loudspeakers. One glance at the phase graph of a single drive unit would suggest this is already a problem for 1 driver, but combine 2 drive units with a crossover whose filter is derived by phase shift and we realise how tough a task it really is to make music in the home.


PRaT NOW is:

Pace, Rhythm and Timing
could have been: Pitch, Rhythm and Timing
could also have been: Pace, Rhythm and Tune
but never Pitch Rhythm and Tune, to my knowledge


At the beginning of any musical score we can see marks to define the Pace and the Rhythm. These parameters of performance are important enough to be the first pieces of data any player is offered by the composer or arranger, after the title and the composers name!

Only after a sense of the Pace (crotchet=120 for example) and Rhythm (4 crotchets - or quarter notes - to each bar, known as march or common time because it is easy to walk to this rhythm with arms swinging in time) have been set up in the performer's mind do they learn the key signature and then the mode that together might imply the mood of the piece. The example shown below is chosen as a familiar one from school assemblies, where I first learned what music really sounded like, Parry's setting of Blake's call to revolutions, perhaps turntable revolutions. Timing can be upset by sources (especially jitter in cd and phase shift in cartridges), amplifiers (especially at the bandwidth extremes) but mostly in speakers. I suspect the superior timing performance of many panel loudspeakers is one of their big attractions. Timing particularly affects the capacity of a system to create a convincing illusion of soundstage from just two speakers. The term Stereo actually translates as 'solid' and the solidity of a stereo image depends on accurate timing from microphone to speaker. How many listeners have noticed that many systems reproduce cymbals in nearer than the drums of the same kit? How long are the drummer's arms? This is usually caused by crossover timing errors between midrange (or mid-bass) unit and tweeter, on top of their individual & inherent errors.



Conclusion
PRaT are the most basic building blocks of musical performance. In domestic audio they are essential for appreciation and enjoyment of music.....

Sheet music prioritises these elements for good reason. Without them you've got nothing musically.

 

I agree...I think it is a psychological effect, it is a perceived thing, but that doesn't make it any less real or without explanation. You're right, proving it is what is difficult, but I think its reasonable to expect that certain things within the equipment chain will affect a person's perception of PRaT (if not actual PRaT). I think you had brought up Rega tables and their ringing plinths, and how this may impart a sense of liveliness to audio playback and is something some folks actually prefer, and one can probably imagine how this could be perceived as PRaT. Proving it is the problem because as you say it's about perception, but I tend to believe in it because I have listened to systems where it just seemed to be there relative to other systems (or, more accurately, it's there in each case but one system may call attention to it and another may downplay it).

I think I just dislike the outright dismissals, like it's a bunch of audiophool hogwash, marketing, and there is nothing to it. I know people want everything to be boiled down to measurements, for everything to be proven, but that's just not possible at this time and very likely may never be. So much of this hobby is about perception, and if one perceives something then in this case perception is as good as reality (I don't generally subscribe to the thought that perception is reality, mind you, but I think I do when we are talking about sitting in a chair listening to sound coming out of speakers, where the goal is largely to present a convincing live performance).

 

Is there anybody who listens to music and the feel of it ?
This awful thread is about nothing at all.
All about snake oil gear, subjective "sound" related babbles.
Worst of all someone advised to throw away things. What an advise.
Is there anybody who realizes that the record or CD is the source, always there is the problem, lousy recordings, compression,fifth generation mastertapes, faulty pressing (too loud) and/or boring music with pristine sound quality, nothing to do about that.
So watch out.

 

" Prat, out the wazoo!! "

 

I just think because it's a psychological thing happening to that particular listener at that particular time it's not a transferable, repeatable experience for anyone else or a description of the gear, it's a description of the reviewers mental state. So it's not really meaningful or useful to read as a description of the gear. I give it a 100 percent discount when I read it.

 

I never used the term, but heard it during the period when Linn was more dominant in the U.S. market. There was a very successful (perhaps the most successful in the States) dealer in Brooklyn that was nearby- I know they emphasized the toe-tapping quality of being engaged in the music.
I think all of these attributes are attempts to describe, in word or thought, what the machinery is supposed to be doing to make a reproduction sound more convincingly real. I agree with the comment earlier that "you know it when you hear it." It's kind of hard to make a science out of subjective audio. I know JGHolt had a set of definitions long ago that some people find useful. For me, it really is a combination of a lot of factors and one system can do some things brilliantly that make it convincing as a musical experience; another system may have a completely different set of weaknesses and strengths that deliver a different, but equally compelling performance. Trying to define what those parameters are is a noble objective, but I'm not sure PRAT or imaging and soundstage or tonal character, or dynamics or bandwidth, etc. captures it all. I guess I find them to be aspects of what a great illusion of reproduced sound can be, but they still don't fully capture it. Part of it too, is having some commonly understood terms that people can use with a recognized meaning. That's also valuable.

 

I feel the same way about a lot of reviewer terms, but I am more willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt if I like their writing. "Touch" and Art Dudley come to mind. I may fill in the blanks in my own mind as to what they mean, and may not find it especially useful, but I still enjoy reading his reviews. As marketing blurbs, though, they are probably useful, even if I'm not the person sold on descriptors like PRaT or touch.

I'm also left cold by extensive soundstaging descriptors. and every other review obsesses about that term, even going so far as to imbue powers to enhance soundstage to components I would never associate with "soundstage" and seem highly unlikely to have any effect on "soundstage" as recorded and reproduced by speakers in a room.

Based on what I read, a lot of the audio experience as relayed in reviews is largely a reflection of mental state, more than anything actually happening with recordings, components, or room acoustics. There's definitely some crossover, but people get pretty solipsistic in their interpretations.

 

Such a great question Gretsch61, and as a fellow musician just as perplexed as you by this this expression, which I've never heard before.

Then it occurred to me what this could mean.

Short story, just a few months ago I was playing with some Coca Cola radio spots from the original reel to reel copies. The recordings were in need of "un mastering" or mastering eq "mistakes" as the their sound is inordinately treble and lacking in bass. My thought was the NAB rec curve may have been applied twice. Well, using Audacity, I applied the NAB Play curve for 7.5 IPS, (my deck already applied it once) Nope, too dull, but now seemed ok in the bass region

I arrived at my own playback eq that sounded right to me, as heard over my pro near field monitors. I also referred to spectral analysis to confirm or perhaps show any unusual anomalies. Each cut required some tweaking, not looking for perfection, but reasonable sound for each artist as I am familiar. For instance, the Motown sound is particularly bright and punchy.

That brings me to what PR&T means, or what I think it means...
As I had completed a few experimental eq settings for "The Supremes" coke spots, I noticed something. It wasn't anything associated with Diana's vocal timbre, or bass strength, or detail in the treble. One of the three sounded more rhythmic. Diana's timing, and rests, (musical term) much more apparent, and really did enhance the movement and syncopation of the song. This may be connected more to the midrange, on how it's presented in this case. I am not suggesting eq changes would improve a well mastered sound recording, because it won't. But resolution of detail may affect the perception of rhythmic timing, on how the music is being presented.

I believe in some instances, "too much" treble or any range in the music spectrum may mask other areas in the spectrum which are more or less rhythmic. (look up "masking" as a human hearing characteristic) A speaker system that produces faster transients may enhance hi hats and cymbals, and kick drum hits, (natural kick drum attack begins in the treble range) therefore a more pronounced rhythmic presentation.

Adding to masking of sound, the density of the waveform makes a difference on its power and dynamics, perhaps perception of rhythm. Any nulls in microphone response or distance between two mics may upset the perception of rhythmic movement or musicality. The same could be said of any nulls in speaker response and room response.

In my language PR&T is simply, " musicality".

In the near future, I'd like to upload a few partial sound clips just for study and discussion, (original, and three experimental corrected clips)
Have no idea what I just said ....
Steve VK