how would you describe a system that is musical in nature

Are you able to hear and listen to the 3-d micro- dynamic envelope of each piano note like if each note was a real 3-d object living in space in the middle of your room with his own color and physionomy? are you able to "see" this note?

If yes, your audio system/room is acoustically musical...

If not, sorry for you ....

Musical for a musician and for an acoustician is a quality related to the non amplified natural "timbre" experience of a piano a guitar or a voice etc...

Non amplified, because the electronic background noise of the electronical gear process must not hide or veil the musical instrument own resonant body subtle information .... The micro dynamical subtle cues of the natural musical instrument are also the micro dynamical cues you wanted to keep emerging from your room ...These same well known "cues" about human voice or piano, their presence or their absence, will guide you through the fine tuning process of your room acoustic treatment and control...


And you need a room acoustically controlled to reach for each "bunch of frequencies and harmonics" , and which will create for them , a space where 3-d perception of sound volume impression is possible.... Accuracy of gear engineering is not enough for that... Acoustic science do the end job....

The timbre particular resonance of an object inform us about the specific quality of this object....Read this 2 times.... 😁 And ponder on it ....

We cannot reduce "timbre" to frequency accuracy.... Timbre is a "lived" perceptive experience in some environment like your room, not only an equation...

Mathematical accuracy of tone is not enough to describe musical experience....The specific resonant body information of a specific musical instrument and human body must be conveyed by the speakers through a room which is controlled and modified to accomodate them SPECIFICALLY and make this possible... .





«A system is musical if you see music with your ears and if you listen with your eyes»-Anonymus Acoustician



Wait a minute! are you saying that a deaf person can see music through his body ?- Groucho Marx 🤓

Ask Beethoven or Helen Keller....- Harpo Marx

If everything sounds clear and is in the right proportions, but is not convincing enough to provide your brain with an emotional experience, the system is likely analytical sounding. If the system consistently transports you into the performance so that you can forget about how the system sounds, odds are good it’s a musical sounding system.

...transparency, resolution, and micro dynamics are more critical than perfect tonal balance, because that’s what reveals the space where the performance takes place....either your brain buys it, or it doesn’t, but it’s also heavily dependent on the recording at hand.

This. Study this. Print it, cut it out, tape it to your monitor. Read until memorized.

If your goal is an audio system for enjoying listening to music then you will want a musical system. If your goal is to have charts and graphs and jargon to talk tech then you want analytical. Thus the First Commandment of Audiophile: Know Thyself.

Great post thanks...

I will just add that the way i took to reach this level with the gear i own was near impossible by the power of the gear itself alone...

And my gear choice is very good...( but less good than yours for sure but not too much afar ) 😁😊

I was in the obligation to reach this level to treat mechanically my gear against vibrations and i was in the obligation to decrease the noise floor level of the house and system...

And it was not enough at all...

i was in the obligation to specifically synchronize my passive acoustic treatment and active mechanical acoustic controls of the room to the speakers specificities... And doing this ask for me to listen to the Speakers/room interaction for more than a year daily with small modifications one after the other....I even create a thread about my crazy journey...

To fine tune the speakers /room acoustic relation i used mainly natural timbre of voices and piano and some others instruments i know very well...

It was a success... Like you just say:


" If the system consistently transports you into the performance so that you can forget about how the system sounds, odds are good it’s a musical sounding system."

I dont claim nor pretend that my system is better than anyone else at all... On the contray looking at the virtual audio system here i can say more than half people at least own better component than mine... No discussion about that here...

But when we have the minimum S.Q. to recreate what you just described we forgot the sound and we listen music... It is my case and my dream comes true...

My only claim with an under 500 bucks system and almost no cost for my controls device homemade is my ratio S.Q./ price is really over the roof....