What is meant exactly by the description 'more musical'?


Once in awhile, I hear the term 'this amp is more musical' for some amps. To describe sound, I know there is 'imaging' and 'sound stage'. What exactly is meant by 'more musical' when used to describe amp?

dman777

OK in this post Raul seems to be saying that human hearing perceptual rules are learned rather than inherited. Are there any other interpretations?

They are inherited as is inherited for example the specific geometry of our pinnae and other inner ears factors conditioning our tastes and our tastes are  learned at the same time as a top maestro biases cumulating history ...All  hearing biases could be innate on some aspect and learned on some other...

As psychoustics investigate taste and personal hearing histories in a statistical way using objective controls parameters determined by acoustics experimental history then acoustics is able to let emerge the general principle and controls parameters behind human hearings evaluation of information and perceived qualities...

Taste there is as Raul said, but this is not about mere taste as atmasphere claim rightfully too ...

The two are right then, but if we spoke about "musicality" as a quality , reducing it to relative hearing human tastes, be it acquired or innated , is common place not very significative fact ...it become interesting when psychoacoustics investigate it statistically to isolate fundamental factors and parameters for audio industry for example or hearing aids etc ...

But at the end so useful are Fourier maps they do not explain hearing because no map so good it is can be confused with the territory of human hearing which is non linear and has created by evolution his own time domain ... We do not have a unanimous single hearing theory explaining it all ...We have a powerful technology yes, but technology is not science , only a tool ...

 

Musical - it has to be an umbrella that covers a whole raft of performance parameters and requires they be within acceptable limits. I think pace, rhythm, and timing come under the musical umbrella but also tonality and timbre. Since it’s hard to describe a “shrill” or bright sounding product that causes listener fatigue as being musical, then high frequency performance is in there too. 
I agree with distortion but I think that’s more of a cause than a symptom.


Unfortunately I think each of us has our own set of these performance priorities that must be met before we consider something to be musical, hence as an adjective it isn’t a lot of use in relaying a performance measurement that can be understood by a community. It’s like saying “I’m pleased with it”.

Unfortunately I think each of us has our own set of these performance priorities that must be met before we consider something to be musical, hence as an adjective it isn’t a lot of use in relaying a performance measurement that can be understood by a community. It’s like saying “I’m pleased with it”.

 

Exactly!

 

 

We have all our own tastes order priorities born from the biases acquired or innate and from our own learning history and from our own system/room limits and knowledege ...

But it does not change the fact that "musicality" must be defined by trained musicians and acousticians working together in experiments when we learned how to control and vary all parameters in an optimal way ...

We learned this way for example how some trained musicians can beat the mathematical computed Fourier limits between time and frequencies perhaps 13 times...Because the ears brain work non linearly and in his own time domain territory trained by evolution for music and speech for social and survival reasons and by professional conscious training ...

Taste there is , but it is not about taste when we use the word "musical" ...

 

It’s like saying “I’m pleased with it”.

Pleased, until you find something that comes closer to the mark, for example you find out that you can have something be both smoother and more detailed instead of bright and detailed.

Tube products tend to sound smoother than solid state. This is literally what has kept tubes in business the last 60 years after being declared 'obsolete'. The economic facts here cannot be denied- this has kept tube producers like JJ in business. So that means there are enough people out there that are hearing the same things about tubes.

At that point this becomes easier, because all we have to do is sort out why tubes sound smoother than solid state. And that turns out to be the way they make distortion as opposed to how solid state makes distortion.

So we figured, if distortion is the sonic signature of any audio product, then if you built a solid state amp that had a similar distortion product to a tube amp, it should sound like a tube amp. This turned out to be true.

So there's more to this than just taste.