Well, I also get agitated by advertising that makes unsubstantiated claims!
Agree with this…a guitar which is reproduced superbly will play along with a voice which is reproduced superbly, with meanings and emotions better revealed. This is nothing to do with anything in the time domain.
Don’t be deluded…Naim are no better than anyone else in avoiding the splitting of the signal into voice and guitar, and then one of these getting delayed.
This is simply accurate reproduction of signals.
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Although I would not call myself an audiophile, I’ve been around good to high quality audio all my adult life. I’ve owned decent gear and friends have excellent gear valued in thousands of £££s. None of us owned Naim equipment.
Two years ago, due to having to downsize I have had to look at streaming rather than buying CDs, so asked my retailer for a demo of the Atom. OMG. O. M. G…
This little box of wizardry and magic from Naim pretty much dumbfounded me at its first outing with its musicality, vice-like grip, sheer sense of fun and engagement with whatever I threw at it in terms of musical genre.
Call it PRat or PRAT or Prat or whatever; I call it genius.
Thank you Naim.
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You can achieve good quality sound in a car if it is upgraded and set up properly. Look up Four Masters in uk who distribute Audison and Hertz speakers and amplifiers. They contain dsp to de equalise car settings that are there to try and make $10 speakers work by rolling off bass as volume increases.
Trick is to use a professional car hifi installation company who will install and set up system to get best out of it. Better than handing over hard earned cash to car dealers who will pocket extra commission.
…and this is a more sensible way of expressing this, methinks.
But is there any point when most cars have such a high background noise level (I guess there’s a reason why Naim produce Naim for Bentley not Naim for Ford!), hardly a good environment for hifi listening, and for driving safely neither getting too involved in the music nor dulling senses with high volume levels are desirable. Also it seems so many people change their cars every 2 or 3 years making the cost more significant.
Skintz sound deadening material applied to door panels and sound diffusers behind woofers work wonders.
Indeed, also one shouldn’t really listen at high volume levels anyway if SQ is your primary aim as it drives your hearing into compression and distortion, it’s your body protecting itself.
Sure sometimes loud music gives a vibe and feel, but then we are not talking about SQ there. I now wear party protectors in my ears when exposed to loud music for any length… they let most of the musical frequencies through, just attenuated… I have decided as a music lover my hearing is too important for me.
I have sat in a Bentley with a Naim system playing away, in fact I seem to remember I was with one of our esteemed moderators in the car with me. It all sounded very impressive and enveloping, but it isn’t what I would call accurate stereo sound reproduction by any stretch of the imagination.
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It seems to me that Prat (participatory music) is conditioned by the energy capacity deployed by the system, from the sources to the loudspeakers. Large systems require amplifiers capable of driving complex loudspeaker loads, otherwise prat is lost. It’s often easier to obtain Prat with modest loudspeakers and electronics. Loudspeakers operating in good conditions with correct phase settings contribute to system timing.
Indeed speakers with large baffles will struggle more phase so more has to be done in the crossover to mitigate destructive phase issues.
This is is one reason why small speaker baffles (wrt to the listener) tend to be better with timing and phase, but smaller speakers don’t have the same scale or extreme dynamics… so you need to choose your poison. We all listen out for different things in our audio replay systems… and replay is about a choice of compromises.
See above…recently I have learnt that the ‘integrity’ of reproduced music is hugely influenced by accuracy. Large speakers tend to have real problems with bass related room aftefacts. If you abolish these artefacts, you enter a new level. If I have lost anything with DSP (Space Optimisation), I have gained vastly more in exchange.
So smaller speakers, without so much bass extension, do have advantages in some areas.
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The toe tapping thing for a lot of people is almost an involuntary reaction to engaging music. (Certain types of music)
All I’m saying is that I think that PRAT is what tends to drive that.
You might not be a foot tapper or a head bobber and that is absolutely fine.
I tend to be a bit of both, if the music has an infectious rhythm or beat… I can’t say I am an air guitarist however……
But if music is playing on my system and the foot starts tapping I note Mrs SinS and my foot do actually tend to be in time….
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I think that was one of the drivers for speaker manufacturers designing them narrower than previously (retaining height, but becoming deeper instead to retain volume).
I think narrow baffles help with imaging rather frequency phase issues. But there have been some notable designs from Morel and others that have the baffles in landscape mode… so there are different ways of skinning that cat.
Either that is not the toe-tap driver or the crummy amp/speakers in my flat screen TV has PRaT, amongst other non-hifi sound sources, as I have experienced involuntary toe tapping with that.
That lovely pray isn’t a naim monopoly
Many things can improve an average system
Power cables
Interconnects
Set up
It’s possible to get prat without a single naim component!
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Listening shouldn’t be such a challenge. We can all welcome hifi that makes music more “musical” 
No amount of reading about this will actually tell you what it sounds like. Once you hear it, you will immediately recognize its attributes.
PRAT is what draws you into the music even if you are not listening in the sweetspot, or are trying to concentrate on someting else. Things like imaging, soundstage, separation are only really appreciated if you try to listen for them.
At one stage in my audio journey I had a decent system…MIchel Focus One, Hadcock arm, a 50 UKP sonus Blue cartridge, A60, Tangent speakers and it had lovely depth and tonality, but was missing someting intangible.
Then one of my friends bought a Russ Andrews system on a limited budged. An original Rega Planar 3 (with the S arm) and a Nytech 252XD receiver. But that exhausted his funds so he ‘made do’ with a 10 UKP bottom of the range cartridge (I think maybe the ortofon VMS10) and a pair of tiny shoebox speakers he culled from a Rigonda Music center.
And his system had this missing factor that mine lacked. I did not know what to call it at the time, because the vocabulary to describe it had not yet been invented.
The PRAT factor, once defined, was seized by Linn who asserted that it was their table alone that was responsible for this, and the toe-tapping test was born.
I hae heard all types of systems with true PRAT, and indeed some of them have been Linn-Naim ones.
An LP12/LV-V Basik tonearm/basik cartridge/42/110/Kan 1s had this in spades in spite of multiple failings at other levels.
A friends Systemdek II/LV-X/A60/Heybrook HB1s was almost as good, at a fraction of the cost.
Much more recently another friends Audio Research/Wilson MAXX2 speakers was totally lacking in this department, athough the imaging, micro-details and dynamics were as good as about I had ever heard.
One unlikely system that also ticked the PRAT box for me was…
Ipod-gen 3, plugged into the base, powered by a long discontinued Naim brick supply (I forgot what it was called), into a HeadRoom headphone amp with optional external power supply and then into the Etymotic IEMs.
That IPod on many occasions was also plugged into my active sixpack DBLs system via a Chord 3.5mm-Din5 cable (this was the late 90s version of streaming via a music server) and it retained some of its PRAT abilities.
A single component cannot by itself creat a PRAT laden system (no, not even an LP12), but a single component can destroy it. Years ago I had a system with a Classe amplifier…the DR10. I got this from a dealer unheard, because it was being sold used at a very attractive price.
It played LOUD but sounded boring at every volume level. I then tried an ancient somewhat modded ‘Son of Ampzilla’ 25WPC amp and suddenly I got a huge injection of this fun factor.
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Very good, this is spot on 
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