PRaT: "Pace Rhythm and Timing" or "PRetentious audiophile Trash"?

It is an audio critic coined term that tends to be in the eye of the beholder. If you think you know what it means, you will apply it to what you hear to praise it and regard the lack as a condemnation.

Many of the terms used by audiophiles are imprecise and can mean different things to different observers, a kind of floating garden of verse. My interpretation, which is by no means authoritative, is that "pace rhythm and timing" means that you are caught up in the energies and micro transitions of the music as if they were live, but that other qualities, such as imaging, depth, dimension, detail, tone color etc. remain separate issues. You can have other attributes that are nominally good, such as a highly detailed presentation and good imaging, that nonetheless can lack PRAT.

To me, it does represent the poetic license of the audio critic to justify likes and dislikes: "I know it when I hear it" subjectivity.

I have heard Naim setups which I haven't liked that much because they sounded a bit harsh and excessive in upper midrange emphasis. Naim lovers, however, claim that they love the equipment for it's superior PRAT, which makes up for the rest.

The very first thing that came to my mind is the music recording...the musician's performance, and not the sound system's reproduction.
If the recording machine was out of calibration, off track, or if the recording engineer was pushing the wrong buttons, ...

But yes, Pace, Rhythm and Timing is about the music performance.

If audio reviewers want to use the terms to describe amplifiers and speakers and turntables and cables and SACD players and music servers and phono preamps be my guest...I'm just not buying faulty electronics. Quality components they disappear and let the music performances float freely above and behind the soundstage with all that comes with it, with the musicians playing their instruments...magic moments captured in time and space.

Does a tube amp have a slower pace than a solid state one? That'll be the day.
Does a speaker wire express a better rhythm? That'll be the day.
Does a turntable have a more correct timing? Not if all of them are spinning @ the same 33.333 rpm speed for music performances recorded @ that speed.

I do resist PRaT somewhat as pretentious nonsense. But that's mostly because it appears so often as a descriptor in some of the British magazines whose reviews I think are useless (e.g. WhatHiFi).
I have a problem with overly romanticized "how it made me feel" or anthropomorphized "they played X song with alacrity" stuff, because it's so subjective as to be useless. I don't mind it thrown in so long as it's part of a more descriptive
account of the sound (e.g. character of frequency response, imaging, bass depth/clarity etc).

That said...

I certainly have experienced the difference a component can make in the sense of rhythmic drive and sense of "speed." At the moment I'm using Thiel 2.7 speakers and they have a transient clarity, combined with a super precise midbass punch and density, that rhythm sections just sound propulsive. I swear it almost makes sound "sped up" compared to other speakers. I also demoed another similar size speaker in my room that had precisely the opposite effect. A more ponderous, ported bass response that actually seemed to subjectively slow down the rhythm of the music. It was very pronounced. So...I get the effect can occur. But I do find it overused in certain hi-fi circles.

About transient response. Harmonic distortion. Damping factor. Slew rate and rising time.

Great question Ron and one I have been wondering about recently as well. I was told recently that a component sounded like the timing was off - like it was speeding up and then slowing down. I've never experienced this when dealing with a digital component. I get it when the source is depending upon proper speeds, but I would think in the digital realm it wasn't an issue?

I was left thinking that perhaps it was just the major shift in tonal balance that caused the impression, but I'm definitely open to being wrong about that. It's an area I'm grey in.

Ron Resnick said:

In the audiophile context what does “pace, rhythm and timing mean”?

Absent a turntable or a tape deck which is exhibiting wow or flutter, or whose motor is not turning the platter or the reels at precisely the correct speed continuously, what do we mean by an audio system which manifests good or poor “pace, rhythm and timing”?

If the source is turning at precisely the correct speed on a perfectly consistent basis why would it fail to exhibit proper “pace, rhythm and timing”?

Does this audiophile expression have real, useful, determinate meaning, or is it pretentious audiophile nonsense?

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“Pace, rhythm and timing ” has shown in the audiophile narrative decades ago in a defined context to illustrate the subjective characteristics of some systems when compared to another school of stereo sound reproduction. Those who lived at that time and listened to such equipment will perfectly understand what it can mean - it is surely related to preference. Probably reading those old debates people with some experience can understand what PRAT addressed. But I do not expect that anyone will change his mind just reading some posts a few lines long in audioforums.

Those interested can google "PRAT" "Martim colloms" or "PRAT" "Paul Messenger" - there are tens of good references on it and great debates against and pro PRAT. But the more recent articles on PRAT are published in HifCritic, a subscription paid magazine.

I have a pragmatic approach to high-end - if a concept is useful for communicating in audio with others and can helps me building my audio system and enjoying my music I try to understand it and those who express around it. But I would never use the word PRAT in the DIYaudio forum ...

I view it as meaningless jargon.

I believe that describing what we are perceiving through our senses is often difficult but PRAT seems to me a very useful phrase that describes what we perceive when the attack of each sound is cleanly defined & doesn't fluctuate. We can easily understand this in the analogue world of audio reproduction where the source of the signal originates from a moving medium .i.e tape or vinyl speed fluctuations, when not gross, may not be perceived as changes in pitch but more subtly as a loss in definition/timing.

In digital audio it's much more difficult to correlate a perception of PRAT with any root cause but I believe it is still the result of the attack or rise time of each sound not being clearly defined. How this might happen could be as a result of noise modulation - in other words the noise shaping of most digital audio could be fluctuating in correlation with the signal & as a result, the attack transients are less clearly defined as there is an increase in noise when the attack starts. I don't believe that we perceive this noise as such but rather we perceive PRAT when the noise is absent & timing is perceived as more sharply defined.

It seems that our auditory perception perceives more than just amplitude & frequency of each sound - the timing & rhythm is the heart of a performed piece & often the interplay of this timing is what makes for a great performance & conveys the interaction among the players. Better, more accurate reproduction of this seems to allow us more insight into the music & perceived as more realism

Just as an aside, here are two recordings of exactly the same piece of digital audio (same file so bit identical) played back without any manual manipulation. In both cases DS (Direct Sound) was used & the only difference between them was that one used the native Win10 driver & the other used a loaded driver for the DAC device. I'm not saying this is an example of PRAT as there is a gross obvious difference between them & both might sound correct but when comparing them you can hear the difference - it's just an example of how timing can be wrong in digital audio too.

Try voting on which you think is correct - the clip contains two 1 minute portions of a song
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sa106klmu2oi5he/sample.m4a?dl=0

John, this is a great, if slightly overdone illustration of PRAT. Obviously the two fragments are not bit-identical - some heavy processing was involved.

analogsa said:

John, this is a great, if slightly overdone illustration of PRAT. Obviously the two fragments are not bit-identical - some heavy processing was involved.

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Well, the same digital audio file was played for both clips (so bit identical, by definition) & the only difference was the driver, as I said. Any heavy processing, bit manipulation must have happened in the software so I don't know what bits the DAC was receiving but the driver is not designed to do this so it was a problem between the driver & Win10's direct sound mode (it's audio stack)? It works fine with Asio Wasapi mode, just not DS mode in Win10 (works fine with DS in Win8, AFAIK)

I can achieve the same result if I use the wrong clock speed to play back a 44.1 samplerate file i.e the correct clock would be 22.5792Mhz but if I used a 24.576Mhz clock (which is correct for the 48KHz speed family), it would be speeded up or visa versa slowed down like you hear in the clip.

Yes, I don't consider this PRAT as in how the phrase is typically used - PRAT is much more subtly perceived - sometimes people report it as the players having much more time, not seeming as rushed in their playing.

BTW, which do you consider is the correct speed in that clip - the first or the second minute?

Without any hesitation- the second minute. And not because of the faster tempo but simply because it sounds in tune.

It might be interesting to contemplate the underlying differences in timing & how we are perceiving them

In my example where I have used the wrong clock & achieved the exact same slowing down or speeding up lets calculate the differences
Using a 22.5792MHz clock to play back a 44.1Hz audio file results in 22.67us timing of each sample
If a 24.576MHz clock is used instead then we get 20.83uS timing of each sample

So what is being perceived is the result of a 1.84uS difference in timing or am I being too simplistic in my logic here?

If that is all that is affected then the gross difference you hear is the result of this 1.84uS difference in samples - interesting?

analogsa said:

Without any hesitation- the second minute. And not because of the faster tempo but simply because it sounds in tune.

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I wonder what others think?

PRAT is neither pretentious audiophile nonsense nor meaningless jargon. It's real.

Back in the early days of digital, all CD players more or less had problems with rhythm & timing, compared to most turntables. The music just didn't 'rock' or 'swing', there was no 'foot tapping' quality to the music. The worst offenders perhaps were the first cheap 'bitstream' players from the early Nineties. The problem was so bad that people in the high-end store in the Netherlands, where I was at the time, told me that many customers bought Marantz CD 80 players despite their harsh highs, because at least they were not too far behind in rhythmic quality compared to their Linn turntables.

An audio buddy of mine and me often used the track 'Josie' by Steely Dan,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg9RyiPKhx8

in order to gauge rhythm performance. On many players or systems the 'swinging' rhythm fell apart, degrading into an uninvolving, dull mess.

(But it was not just digital: we also noticed a breakdown of rhythm on 'Josie' upon switching of an interconnect!)

There is a great 1992 article by Peter van Willenswaard in Stereophile,

Pace, Rhythm, & Dynamics: one listener's lament

on this topic, which was in my view spot on, dealing with CD players of the day.

It is an accompanying article to

Pace, Rhythm, & Dynamics

written by Martin Colloms, which in my view is one of the most fundamentally important articles about high fidelity reproduction ever written (not the most important, for sure).

I can say that my first three CD players/combos (Cambridge CD3, Meridian 208, Meridian 602/606) all had some rhythm problems. My next combo, Wadia 8/12 from 1993 was good on the swing in jazz, but only with good power conditioning. It still was only decent on rock. The first DAC that I had that really could rock was the Berkeley Alpha DAC 2, but even it is bettered rhythmically by my current Schiit Yggdrasil DAC.

As good as the Berkeley is, on Art Blakey's famous drum solo "Freedom Rider" the Yggdrasil DAC is rhythmically even more assured, and in some passages the Berkeley sounds rhythmically somewhat 'confused' in comparison.

Overall though I had no complaints about the Berkeley on rhythm, compared to great turntables, and I would say that the Yggdrasil DAC is one of the rhythmically best performers is that I have heard, regardless if digital or analog. Digital has come a long way, for sure.

***

Of course, amps and speakers can be culprits as well, as also outlined in the article by Martin Colloms. I once auditioned a speaker (on my Berkeley DAC as the source) which made the incredible rhythm on Elvis' "(You're the) Devil in Disguise" sound as if it was played by a mediocre, drunken wedding band. What a mess!

PRAT is nothing more than euphonic colorations that the listener enjoys. Nothing wrong with that.

Speedskater said:

PRAT is nothing more than euphonic colorations that the listener enjoys...

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I don't agree. We get accused of having PRaT a lot; its the exact opposite of a coloration.

PRaT is simply about an organic musical presentation. IMO the phrase shouldn't have much meaning since the character of PRaT must arise solely from the recording itself: the recording provides the pace and timing. But the thing is, the human ear/brain system has a number of perceptual rules, and if the playback system does not seem to be honoring those rules, the processing of the music will move from the limbic system to the cerebral cortex.

When that happens the toe-tapping is gone.

IOW, to have PRaT, the system (and the recording) must obey enough of our physiological hearing rules such that the music is processed by the limbic system. If that is the case, then some will say that the system has PRaT.

Speedskater said:

PRAT is nothing more than euphonic colorations that the listener enjoys. Nothing wrong with that.

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And have you ever heard these "euphonic colourations" yourself & what did you hear or is this just your belief about something you have no experience of?

Atmasphere said:

I don't agree. We get accused of having PRaT a lot; its the exact opposite of a coloration.

PRaT is simply about an organic musical presentation. IMO the phrase shouldn't have much meaning since the character of PRaT must arise solely from the recording itself: the recording provides the pace and timing. But the thing is, the human ear/brain system has a number of perceptual rules, and if the playback system does not seem to be honoring those rules, the processing of the music will move from the limbic system to the cerebral cortex.

When that happens the toe-tapping is gone.

IOW, to have PRaT, the system (and the recording) must obey enough of our physiological hearing rules such that the music is processed by the limbic system. If that is the case, then some will say that the system has PRaT.

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Interesting.....So a system with PRaT can play a recording without PRaT and the music will not have PRaT?