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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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In Reply to: i guess i've been spoiled? posted by analog guy on May 9, 2007 at 17:19:44:
Heinrich Heine wrote that music is "spirit, but spirit subject to the measurement of time." My tendency is to speak about 'timing' and include what in the acronym is intended by the P and the R.The semantics for describing components tends to be somewhat shaky. Hopefully some information gets imparted and communication occurs. Describing sound and describing music are hard.
I'm coming to the view there are characteristics applicable to music and characteristics applicable to the experience of hearing music reproduced through a stereo system. Both can be helpful when describing how components 'sound'. For example, a deep soundstage can be an attribute of one's experience listening to a stereo system, but we tend not to think of it as an attribute of music. Perhaps it is part of a listening context, an ambience, but you won't hear a conductor urge his orchestra to play with a 'deep soundstage'.
On the other hand, music as a performing art, occurring in time, involves timing as an inherent characteristic. Composers typically include explicit timing marks on their scores, both in terms of a time signature (beats per measure, what note value the beat represents) and in terms of tempo markings, eg. allegro, presto, andante, etc. Regardless of the components in your stereo, timing is, as you suggest, associated to music and the timings involved in the making of music are independent of that music's reproduction. Timing along with dynamics, and tonality *are* characteristics of music, regardless of whether it is heard through a stereo or experienced in the concert hall.
Go over to the Music asylum and you'll find discussions about the interpretation of the same piece of music by different conductors and sometimes those speak of things such as Maestro so-and-so taking the Scherzo too fast, which yields a poorer performance than some other. As the orchestra's 'master clock', the conductor is on the input side of timing, attempting to get all the musicians in the orchestra, not just on the same page, but together at the exact same spot in score at the same time. If enough musicians are 'off', the result may be an audible distortion of the composer's intent.
The PRaT business is one angle on how well the recorded music gets reproduced via a stereo, one way of attempting to describe the experience of listening. Presumably one values a reproduction that is no quicker or lanquid than the original. PRaT makes up one aspect of the relative veracity of music through the component or system under evaluation.
Consider cables as an audio component and think of an audio waveform in time.. The topology of the wires in an IC or speaker cable can have an effect on a cable's inductance and a cable's dielectric can have a capacitive effect. If a signal at time A is stored then released later at time B it interferes with the signals that should be arriving at time B and the overall signal loses some of it phase coherence. The net effect is not that much different than the second violins being an eighth of a second behind everyone else. In a stereo system the result is a distortion on the timing of the signal passing through the cable. You may not notice, or you may hear, for example, a slight blurring or smearing of the leading edge of a note. Add up the cumulative effect across time and the reproduction is less true to the original. Think about the time alignment factor of a speaker's design - the point being to get all signals at different frequencies occuring at time A to arrive at your ears together.
Describing the PRaT of a component is one way to describe and assess this sort of distortion or its relative absence. There are other semantics that amount to the same thing. The description of a component as transparent or clear might be understood as an assessment of its phase coherency. Less temporal distortion may yield an experience of more detail, or longer decay or more higher order harmonics - its not just a question of whether the component got rhythm, but some folks may parse it out that way in their descriptions. Different reviewers use different words and concepts. Some components do the timing thing better than others. A component that is ill adept doesn't yield an effect like playing a record at 31-1/3rpm, but music through it may not be as vivacious or lively. I think its something you'll notice more by comparison between different components.
So while timing is indeed a characteristic of music, the relative accuracy of music's reproduction depends (in part) on the absence of timing distortions. Or that is one way to think about it. Heine also said 'when words leave off, music begins.'
Tim
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Follow Ups
- Timing in music and components - JTimothyA 21:46:18 05/09/07 (0)
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