5 steps in developing hearing

Why is it that you never hear of the musicians getting credit for pace, rhythm and timing?  

:-)

Pace rythm and timing or PRAT  describe the real sound qualities of sermons by preachers transmitted by loudspeakers at the end of pop masses decades ago.

😊😉

A wall of sound in a way. 😁

I prefer Rhythm and Pace… as PRaT sounds more like brat, but just a different term for what is probably the most difficult to directly focus your minds eye on (all right, in this case ear on), and yet is probably the most important sonic parameter to a great sounding musical system.

The OP brings it up in number 4 because unlike detail,  imaging, or slam you do not sense it directionally… as in right there in a certain place in the sound field are the cymbals and they have a certain sonic characteristic, or the bass… easy to focus your attention on.

PRaT is a characteristic of the whole system…. Of the music coming out. You cannot sense it from listening to the snare drum relative to the kick drum. It is the timing of all the music and effects you very subconsciously. It is what makes you tap your foot, or want to sway with the music. It is not what sparks your mind’s eye to listen to the whack of a drumstick or bowing of a cello string. It is what sucks you into the music and establishes that primal connection.

While you cannot be missing all the other good attributes of a system, this is the one that truly makes a system enthralling and engaging. This is the thing that makes it hard to drag yourself away from the system after hours of listening. So, if you can walk away from your system after playing and album or are ever fatigued, this is probably what you are missing and it is worth investing a lot of time trying to learn how to perceive it and get it into your system. There are a tremendous amount of high end equipment that is virtually devoid of it.

I’ve never heard a system with strong PRaT attributes while playing music I dislike.

Coincidence?

There are many people who find great PRaT in car stereos and/or smartphones.

Sliding scale?

Terminology can become problematic when it’s concocted beyond a basis of real-world meaning.

Conspicuously absent is the first thing I listen for, and has been since I was 18 years old: How closely reproduced vocals approach the sound of real life ones. I recorded my 3-year-old’s voice with a small capsule condenser mic plugged into a Revox A77, and use that recording to evaluate the sound of loudspeakers, a brutal test.

I also recorded the sound of my Gretsch drumset (early-70’s "stop sign" badge) and Paiste 602 cymbals---the sounds of which I am of course intimately familiar---with a pair of the same mic. I can actually strike the drums and cymbals as the recording plays on speakers, and get an instant comparison between the sound of the drums and cymbals and how any given loudspeaker reproduces the recording of them. Another brutally revealing test.

I first saw the terms "accurate timbre" and "vowel coloration" in the early-1970’s writings of J. Gordon Holt in his Stereophile Magazine (he was it’s owner and sole reviewer), and instantly adopted those parameters (the presence of the former, the absence of the latter) as the most important in the reproduction of music. FAR more important than, say, soundstaging.

I was also drawn to the writings of Art Dudley, from whom I added "color saturation" and "tonal density" to my hi-fi vocabulary/lexicon. Art referred to imaging (in all it’s diverse forms) as "parlour tricks".😊 Harry Pearson placed soundstaging at just about the top of his priority list.