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

The timbre has to be authentic and therefore pleasing. When just last night my new tonearm auditioned my system became much more musical. I don't care to use any other adjectives. Stayed up way to late.

I understand what you are saying; however I personally think I might describe that as accuracy more than musical. Not to protract this any further, but I am good with Webster’s definition (paraphrasing) of musical having to do with being pleasing and harmonious, and back in the ’70s and ’80s when the live venues we were going to were mostly coliseums or amphitheaters I really don’t remember the SQ being very good at all.

@immatthewj 

It wasn't: it wasn't musical. If the presentation is accurate, it will also be musical because it reproduces the music.

I also was wondering if in your opinion there was a trade off other than LF bandwidth when using high efficiency horn speakers? (I was thinking of some of the newer Klipsch monitors that MD carries.) Would there be a reason NOT to use this speaker with a moderately powered amp? Such as a tube amp doing 50 wpc in triode mode?

My speakers are 98dB which is at the low end of 'high efficiency' and they do not lack any resolution WRT any speaker I know of. So other than size, no, there's no tradeoff, rather lower efficiency speakers are the ones with tradeoffs, since they typically have problems with thermal compression if you try to push them to higher volumes.

To answer your question on that other thread,  if you have a 4 Watt SET, your speakers should be about 105-107dB in most rooms. That will allow you to not run the amp higher than about 50% of full power and often a lot less. But a lot depends on the room- if you have a smaller room you might get by just fine with speakers that are in the mid 90s.

It is good to talk on motivations and fundamentals of our audiophile hobby... Too many posts, was basically able to read the beginning of this nice thread.

I agree that subjectivity factor cannot be ignored, we may perceive things in different ways dispite that our basic perception organs are working similarly. It also depends in which mood are we currently. And one cannot ignore the music itself. There is music that makes one feel good but doesn't somebody else, and visa versa. What matters finally is which kind of feelings provokes in you certain audio equipment while auditioning certain music. 

In practical terms, I would say that one's audio equipment is "musical" if it allows to experience the best feelings that one is able to experience auditioning a particular piece of music. As in love we associate our feelings with a particular personality, we may associate a particular audio equipment (and a piece of music) with musicality. A musical equipment would maximize the positive emotions that one is able to experience while auditioning certain music. The musical equipment would make you feel completely satisfied.

And it was said a lot what technical features a musical system should have in absolute terms. Still, some of these "absolute" features may not be that universal but can rather can be subjective. 

Defining "musical" as being a concept completely determined by individual tastes and biases is not even wrong...

Do you know what means the expression "not even wrong" ?😁

The expression was popularized by scientific debates, about the supercords theory by Peter Woit writing about physical theory that cannot be falsified by experiments...

Speaking of "individual taste" in acoustic cannot be proven right or wrong, because acoustic use all the parameters constraining human tastes in general to study"musicality" ... Then defining "musicality" in musical judgement of playback system by " individual taste" is not a claim that is even wrong and it cannot be falsified ... It is simply a claim beside the main point which is defining "musical" for all humanity ...Individual taste cannot be falsified by acoustical experiments , contrary to supercords, because individual taste exist for sure , but is not as an individual factor the matter of acoustic studies when acoustician and neurologist look for a definition of the "musical" experience for all humans ...

The feeling and perception associated by harmony and euphony , when we speak of the "musical" concept associated to a playback system, resulted mainly from the way the gear-system is rightfully embedded in a room/house mechanically, electrically and especially acoustically , and this in a way to make possible the TRANSLATION of the specific parameters trade-off choices of the recording engineer from the recording hall, TRANSLATED into your system/room/ears/brain... It is acoustics and psychoacoustics matter, it is not about mere INDIVIDUAL taste but about the way the ears/brain of all humans are wired to perceive timbre, localization of sounds, distortions as harmonious or not and immersiveness if all is well done as the end result ...

Thinking that "musical" is mainly an individual taste affair is created by marketters to sell gear according to your "taste".... It is not even wrong because : taste there is for sure, but it is not about individual taste but it is about the collective common "taste" and neurological biases of the human species as determined in a general way by neurologists working with acousticians and musicians and non trained human subjects statistically ...

Then when i feel that my system/room is "musical" i use my trained experience and history, call it my "taste", but what caused my feeling is the room parameters, the speakers parameters the inner ear parameters the brain parameters all coupled together... It is abbreviated by the word "taste" in marketing...

But marketing does not replace science and basic knowledge about mechanical, electrical and acoustical embeddings working controls of the mechanical field of the gear/room , of the electrcal field of the gear/room/house and of the acoustical field of the room and of the psychoacoustics physiological human biases of the listener as a human subject ...

i hope to had been clear ...

Others can explain it more simply than me , i dont master english very well ...😁

Taste there is but it is not about taste...

I thought that this short sentence could kill all debate but i was naive.... People stick to half truth more strongly than to lies...

😊

Mahgister, you expressed your talks perfectly well. I also understand what “not even wrong” means. But let  me not agree with you. Firstly, I don’t see any relationship between individual taste and marketing. I am too far from marketing but I think i have my individual taste. As a simple example, the food I like that I find in supermarkets often disappear, because what I like most people just do not like. I cannot say that this is equally true regarding my tastes in music, but It is also partly true compared to the taste of the vast majority of the people.
 

You set up your experiment for a hypothetical individual who doesn’t exist.
And even more, all that  surrounds us is the result of our individual perception, only our “observation” makes solid things to exist. Imagine that nothing of this exists in reality, and is a result of our imagination (wave collapse in quantum theory).