I was waiting to collect my kit from Darran at Class A a few years ago and from reception, I heard some speakers in the dem room. I guess this is kind of tune dem listening. They sounded like the most amazing speakers I had ever heard, detailed, dynamic, in your face, totally engaging………for about 15mins. Then I found the sound started to get tiresome. The phrase “Thrashy, trashy fun” sprung to mind. My take is that neither PRAT nor Tune dem can be considered a way to assess speaker performance. The only way you can really do that is to listen to them at home for a few weeks. It’s kind of why I don’t do demos. I just absorb others views one way or the other, then take an educated risk.
I think music you like and music you don’t like is the real measure. I never get involved in ‘most over rated band/artist’ debates for that reason. Over rated simply means ‘don’t like’. Under rated the reverse.
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I agree and not just for speakers. When I got my Linn DSM/Organik about a year ago I naturally compared it with my Auralic pre/streamer (Vega G2). During the demo at the dealer’s, although the Linn edged it, I thought the performance of the Auralic came surprisingly close and decided to hang on to it to build a second system. A few weeks ago, I had occasion to swap the Vega back in temporarily and my immediate reaction was “who threw a blanket over the speakers?”. The Linn had so much more sparkle and realism.
Puzzling over my different reactions to the same pair of boxes at two different times, I still can’t decide whether something physical was going on (e.g. not enough warmup time) or it was more a question of psycho-acoustics? Either way, we are fortunate in the U.K. that home dems are possible when buying high end gear.
Roger
When I first bought Naim kit I happened to be studying acoustics and noise control. My thesis compared real time spectrum analysis with objective and subjective views of changes to loud speaker stands. As a result I was a convert to a simple philosophy: it is essential to set up the equipment well. As a result I appreciated / liked a wider range of music.
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I think both terms have been designed as sales aids to allow brands to position themselves as something special. They also allow lots of threads and discussions on fora.
Prat and tune dem are perhaps artefacts left over from the past. These ideas were no doubt very important and influential and I’m sure that some folk are still very entrenched in.
Today most serious listeners are more open minded and “fluid” about finding nirvana.
I think such approaches maybe were more relevant/fresh back then, when (from memory, so probably not utterly correct) it seemed a lot of people - and most of the ones I knew who liked or had HiFi - seemed more impressed by how a system sounded rather than how the music was conveyed.
That Telarc 1812 was popular, but not for Tchaikovsky so much as those damn cannons blowing the doors off! Lol.
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Funnily enough, that’s what I found when I bought my first commercially made speakers, the audition seeing off a dozen other speakers of similar moderately high price, the vast majority of which I rejected as awful within the first minute or two of hearing, despite being mostly on the top of their manufacturers ranges, and all coming highly praised in reviews.
Interesting, as I was never aware of manufacturers designing for holographic imaging or instrumental separation, rather for clarity and neutrality. Maybe my stopping routine reading hifi press by late 80s or so missed something. Certainly Quad’s famous saying “straight wire with gain” alluded to an intent to not in any way modify the signal other than provide the power to drive speakers. Naim on the other hand specifically focussed on timing, getting that right almost to the exclusion of other accuracy concerns, until in more recent years it seems that design improvements started aligning other aspects, hence the observations from some that the “Naim sound” has diminished/changed.
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