How can we have more musicality than what is on the record?
I don't think it's a matter of having more musicality than what's on the record, but of some designs preserving more of what's there than others. For example, turntable designs using high mass are believed by some to lose "musicality." The afore-mentioned Ken Lyon once wrote, ". . . if the mass is high, ever larger amounts of energy will be stored and rereleased back into the system, droning over a prolonged period and altering both time and amplitude related functions of the signal." The little VPI Scout is believed by many to be their best-sounding model, possibly because it's smaller and lighter than the others. Art Dudley found the Scout more musical than a larger, more expensive VPI he had auditioned previously. In his review of the Scout, he said:
"One song was all it took—one verse, if you want to know the truth—to know that the Scout/JMW combination did an excellent job of getting the notes off the record and weaving them into believable, convincing, rhythmically involving music. . . In other words, the VPI combo did something that I used to consider the sole province of such generally low-mass, generally undamped British record players as the Linns, Roksans, Pink Triangles, and Regas: The VPI played music, and did so convincingly."
And here are some additional excerpts from an old forum post by Ken Lyon. Over on Vinyl Asylum, it's possible to find some detailed explanations from Ken on why certain designs (Roksan Xerxes and Linn LP12) succeed in preserving more PRaT than some others (Michell, Oracle, VPI):
"The design parameters of the turntable fixes a turntables potential ability to preserve pace ,rhythm and timing functions. Most turntable designs completely neglect important performance parameters involved with maintaining locational and dynamic relationships between the sub components in the vinyl replay chain. . .
PRaT is not a sonic feature added to the presentation but rather the prevention of temporally related alterations to the signal.
PRaT is not a single entity but rather several individual related properties lumped together and that combined term is often misused by the ignorant- ie- the footapping thing which is primarily rhythmic.
I am continually amazed to discover the number of folks who regularly use the term PRaT and even support the issue and yet haven't isolated its subcomponents. A device can possess good rhythm and yet clobber pace or timing such as in your Rega Planar3 example.The earlier Planar 3 possesses a good rhythmic quality but has a poor performance in timing, a marginal but satisfactory performance in pacing and a very poor performance in speed and pitch stability and accuracy. A component that displays good rhythmic qualities is not necessarily a good yardstick with which to measure or judge pace, timing or PRaT as a whole."
http://db.audioasylum.com/mhtml/m.h...essage=&sort=score&sortOrder=DESC&forum=vinyl
