I believe I experienced great PRAT for the first time

@pesky_wabbit

I have found sprakers can be a great killer of PRAT.

Me too.

I don’t think it’s too bad today but back in the 1990s and 2000s there seemed to be a lot of loudspeakers that would seem to suck out the life of music, unless perhaps they were turned up very loud.

Some of them seemed to blur the timing by leaving the bass lagging behind and squash some of the dynamics so that the music always felt ’sat on’.

This lead to some trying out various tweaks in order to correct things. I remember British reviewer Jimmy Hughes, the god of tweaks this side of the pond, advocating the extreme measure of removing some or all of the internal loudspeaker wadding in order to liven things up again.

Of course that could lead to an increase in cabinet resonances but as they say, ’you pays your money and takes your choice’.

@cd318 you must be nearly as ancient as me, as can I can well remember Jimmy’s penchant for ripping out the lining of speaker enclosures when writing for Hi Fi Answers - got right up the nose of a couple of manufacturers too if I recall correctly..

@pesky_wabbit 

I think it was Hi-Fi Answers, mid 80s I think.

Somehow, I got sucked into the Linn/Naim cult after HFA ceased publication and I picked up Hi-Fi Review edited by Chris Frankland.

Bad if still an interesting move.

Maybe I'm getting old too but today's audio mags do all seem rather homogenised in comparison to those good ol' 'Wild West' days of the 1980s.

I can imagine manufacturers not being too happy after all their work (and additional expenses) in damping enclosures only to see Jimmy recommending the reverse.

I must have been naive back then for following much of his advice regarding twin and earth/solid core cables, LEDs etc.

Whether removing (some of) the damping from various speakers worked or not would depend upon your preferences. I would be lying if I said I never preferred the sound with at least some of the wadding removed.

Perhaps there was something in Jimmy's idea all along as can be seen by the approach of experienced designers such as Russell Kauffman (of Russell K loudspeakers) who don't use any wadding/damping material in their current designs.

Instead they seek to work with resonances instead of against them.

A brilliant idea, if it can be pulled off, and from what little I've heard, Russell may well have done exactly that.

"Perhaps there was something in Jimmy's idea all along as can be seen by the approach of experienced designers such as Russell Kauffman (of Russell K loudspeakers) who don't use any wadding/damping material in their current designs. Instead they seek to work with resonances instead of against them."

Can you see the logical fallacy in that statement?  Damping materials also seek to work with resonance.  There is no getting away from resonance, so any and everything you do to a cabinet can either broaden a resonant peak or attempt to reduce the peak resonance in magnitude or you name it. But resonance is there, regardless of how you treat it, so not treating it is just another choice off the "treatment" menu.

Somehow, I got sucked into the Linn/Naim cult after HFA ceased publication and I picked up Hi-Fi Review edited by Chris Frankland.

ah yes, the good old days of Chris and the flat earth society. In conjunction with the Linn/Naim marketing steamroller they did a pretty good job of brainwashing the British audio mindset for well over a decade, and managed to have the dealers who blinked at their demands fall into liquidation in quick succession.

I think a lot of us finally lost Jimmy when both he and Ed Paul Benson fell in with Peter Belt and went straight down the rabbithole -  last I heard he was clamping strange devices to his water pipes.