Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?

Interesting conversation.... I think about being in a church service several years back, our pianist was excellent, really enjoyed listening to this guy play,  he was a professional and played with several theater groups around town.  Soon we had a guest pianist that sat in at the request of another.  This guy was relatively know jazz pianist and played in the best clubs around the Midwest.... Equally good, but my goodness, these 2 guys attacked the keys totally differently from each other, they paused differently and flowed differently.  So If I listened to both of them on a system without knowing them so well, how would that translate in front of my in my system.  Can you get the same emotion and feel from these 2 very different performances?  To me,  That explains musical.
When I sit down, I normally start simultaneously listening for tonal  balance and sound stage, I quickly get to imaging, dynamics, resolution, detail and frequency extremes. If I don't come across any glaring problems, I can normally kick back and enjoy the music without much more thought about it and just enjoy the music. If I notice a problem,  It'll drive me crazy, I need to address it.  
I'm not sure which camp that puts me in.

Recordings come in all flavors, bad/ugly to excellent/lovely.

Some people have low tolerance for bad/ugly and try to filter it out at all costs.  I’m not one of them but so be it. I want to hear whats there, warts and all. Its a personal preference, not a choice between right versus wrong.  That's why filters were  invented I suspect.

Toss in that bad/ugly is largely a judgement call and its not hard to understand why things are what they are.

Different strokes, different folks, and all that...

With regard to to the subject of what is "musical," let me paraphrase Sir Kenneth Clark (art historian, TV presenter, museum director, and crashing bore): I don't know what "musical" is, but I know when I'm in its presence. (He said this about Civilisation, and I'm using his own spelling of the word here).

To be clear, I fall into the audiophile camp that wants it ALL: realistic imaging, well-resolved detail, dynamics, balance, and I want it in a package that is pleasing to hear. I guess I'd have to define "musical" as just that: pleasant to listen to. Because our ears are all different and our tastes individual, trying to divide the audiophile world into two separate camps is, IMO, a fruitless exercise.

"To be clear, I fall into the audiophile camp that wants it ALL: realistic imaging, well-resolved detail, dynamics, balance, and I want it in a package that is pleasing to hear. I guess I'd have to define "musical" as just that: pleasant to listen to. Because our ears are all different and our tastes individual, trying to divide the audiophile world into two separate camps is, IMO, a fruitless exercise."

Overall that's pretty much where I'm at (and have been for some time). AFA the OP goes, we might as well be asking to sign up for a class at our local community college called: "How To Build A Mediocre Audio System At Any Price Level". 

???

Mabokov, the idea isn't to wince when playing the system, that is called tuning. However, the point I was trying to convey is that there are some people who like systems which when we talk about being musical may not mean balanced, but deliberately rolled off.

So in our minds and system tunning we are trying to capture the energy and liveness of music with realistic treble.

There are good speakers that have shelved treble response, if you remember the Spica TC 50, it was so listenable, huge soundstage great imaging.

We had a totally different response to the Quad's then JHillis, we had Quad ESL 63 US Monitors which we were using with dual Entec subs.

The Quads were very musical but never had the dynamic impact of the Wilson Watt Puppy 5 which proceeded the Quads. 

Long story short the Wilson's captured the energy and excitement of live music while the Quads just sounded "beautiful" just not realitic. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ