Musical?

"Musical" means "Hey, I like this one so much, I can't be bothered with trying to explain why." It's a pretty recent descriptor of choice, along the lines of "sounds more like music, less like hifi." Whatever. By itself, it doesn't convey any more information than making contented grunting noises does. To be more charitable, it conveys the sense of "getting it right," even though the piece might not be the ultimate in one or more specific audiophile qualities. The problem is, "getting it right" totally depends on your personal preferences. It's often hard enough to interpret people's usage of terms like "forward," "warm," "compressed"... The word "musical" is pretty much off the charts in terms of subjectivity.

That said, I liked Noble's answer, too.

I just did a search of the phrase "most musical" on Agon threads, and from that I conclude that "most musical" means nothing more than "best sounding." But I also think Cdc's comment about whether it's the forest or the trees puts well what "musical" usually is used to imply. Still, I dislike the fact that detail often is made the bogeyman for lack of so-called musicality. Increased detail may have the unfortunate side effect of making weaknesses like uneven frequency response or distortion, like graininess, more apparent. But it's not detail per se that is bad. It's these other limitations that distract our attention from the overall musical presentation. The sonic attributes of a system have to be in balance, so I'm pretty much in agreement with Cdc. I would just point the finger at other weaknesses of the system, not detail itself. (Or if there's too much saliva-swallowing in the sound mix, blame the recording engineers.)

Since we're dealing in a medium of words on this discussion board, I really admire those contributors who can clearly describe how a piece of equipment sounds using fairly objective, specific terms. There is so much good-sounding equipment for different tastes -- what a particular reviewer thinks is the best piece often is less important to me than how specifically he can describe the sound of the pieces he's listened to. That is a real skill, in a hobby where terminology is used so subjectively. I think of how "euphonic," which in plain English is very close to "musical" in meaning, here is more often than not used to criticise a component as being distorted. Hifi is a wacky world.