After many years of trying to understand what people mean by PRaT, I think I may have found a more useful metric: IFM.
IFM occurs when, while listening to music, your foot starts tapping before you’ve consciously decided whether the system sounds any good.
I noticed it again tonight while listening to Fink’s Wheels Turn Beneath My Feet. I wasn’t evaluating the system at all. At some point I simply noticed my foot was tapping.
This has one considerable advantage over many traditional hi-fi criteria: it is entirely human-facing. You don’t listen for IFM. By the time you notice it, the measurement has already taken place.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet established whether IFM is improved by adding an NPX 300.
Further research will be required.
IFM™ — Involuntary Foot Movement It isn’t interested in your opinion.
Which I feel also resulted in some dealers starting to tapping their feet as a visual hint to indicate to potential buyers that they were now listening to “the right gear”.
Not in my personal experience. The dealer I worked for in those days, and my current dealer who sold most of the system to me over the last 30 yrs, both let customers listen for themselves and decide for themselves. Neither play(ed) silly games like that.
Reminds of a long ago comment: “These days I like to audition kit slowly at home, without a foot conductor trying to Scientologise the more lucrative result.”
There’s plenty to toe-tap with Bartok. The 2nd mvt of Concerto for Orchestra is a great example. He based a lot of his music on Hungarian folk melodies.
I find involuntary foot tapping can happen upon hearing music I recognise and like in an unexpected situation - e.g. while watch a film on TV, or sitting at a table in a restaurant with piped music. It can be any style of music with a discernible rhythm - classical, rock, anything. Unlike some people I neither expect music to instil foot tapping, nor see it as a measure of sound quality - indeed it can be the poorest quality sound through the crummiest of outputs (e.g built-in speaker in a flat-screen TV) yet still trigger a response, so clearly nothing whatsoever to do with sound or equipment quality. A lot of the time listening to music I don’t tap my feet at all, whether at home or at a live performance.
