Musical?

Musical = hear music....vs....analytical = hear system and "sound" of recording.

Here is a continuum:
clock radio (hear music only)....................studio monitors (hear system only)

**Musical - the forest not the trees**
You hear the musician's emotions, feelings and expressiveness in what they are playing.

**Analytical - the trees not the forest**
you hear the musician's technique and the quality of the recording. You hear the finest details such as door squeaks, people farting, and singers swallowing their saliva. IMO analytical will always lead to unhappiness as you hear too much. All the faults in the system are exposed since you are listening to the system not the music and no system is perfect. Also results in not listening to a lot of music because of bad sound quality.
IMHO there is some kind of relationship between money spent and systems becoming more analytical. As if, for spending a lot of money you better gets lots of detail to get your money's worth. A corollary would be boomy bass when people buy a subwoofer. They want to hear what their money just bought them.

Musical does not have to mean distorted or euphonic as in poor measuring SET's. You can have "musical" with flat F-R speakers and low distortion electronics the key is that they aren't too revealing. Finding the balance between revealing too much and too little is the trick.

Does the music make you tap your foot ,get up and dance,,,is it fun? Put a big smile on your face? to me thats musical!

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.

jaybo +1

Those who can't deal with the term need to loosen up a bit as sometimes it's exactly what you mean to say.

All the best,
Nonoise