Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?

I appreciate the discussion.

Some observations to share:

• After a few decades of demonstration, I have no doubt there can be a strong left-brain/right-brain difference among listeners, and some listeners are in the middle, who eventually make emotional and physical connections to their music- their wives certainly did, right away! All this does assume the system is musical in the first place.
  
  
• When I was in high school, the left-brained ran the A/V dept, getting out the film projectors, running them for class. A few years later, that became TVs and VCRs. I observed that none could or would dance. None played instruments, sang, nor was interested in any of the arts. No one can deny that many of these technical fellows became audio designers (and reviewers, and magazine editors).
  
  
• I have watched countless individuals, including reviewers, clearly not hear when one system at a show was exceedingly musical compared to many other systems nearby.
  
  
• Most reviews start off with observations on 'detail', 'imaging', 'impact', and so on. Few begin with 'musicality' and 'engagement' or 'involvement'. Perhaps this is reflective of those reviewers and even of how poorly their room is setup, more so than the gear. But if some piece of kit was truly musical by a large margin, you'd think an experienced reviewer would hear this right away and report on it. So, I take this to mean that most gear is not musical. Which has been my experience.
  
  
• Regular CDs can be extraordinarily musical yet lacking no details, even on solid-state systems. The trouble seems to be with playback, not with their recording, and I have the recording background to back up this observation. But I have only ever heard this four times since the advent of the CD, and neither system complexity nor price were necessarily why.
  
  
• How do we know what to hear from a recording when we were not in the studio? We know it when we hear it, again, assuming we are wired to respond to musicality. As those are who also sing, play instruments, dance, and appreciate the arts.
  
  
• I have heard several times some gear combinations come together in their flaws to become truly musical, while still lacking many details of the recordings. Best to leave this as fortuitous luck!
  

Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio

Roy,

The problem I have with your use of the term "musical," and the use of that term in general, is that it is so subjective as to be essentially uninformative.  

One person's sterile/analytical is another person's "musical."  One person's rich and rolled off system is "musical"and to another "boring and un-engaging."

We've all gone through plenty of systems/speakers that at first were "musical" to us, but which we later abandoned.

There have been many polls along the lines of "what speaker got you off the merry-go-round/which speaker is your life-time speaker?" and the answers for the speaker that finally gave musical satisfaction are all over the map, representing every design approach.  Some people find Wilson the bees-knees, others have thought them the antithesis of what they are looking for in music reproduction.

So when you tell me you find something "musical" all I can gather is that you like it.  The fact some other people didn't "recognize" something as musical like yourself isn't an objective failing on their part, anymore as your failure to find their choice to be musical.

Thank you for your thoughts.

When you write "One person’s sterile/analytical is another person’s "musical." One person’s rich and rolled off system is "musical"and to another "boring and un-engaging.", those are exactly my points, about how the non-musical listeners just do not get ’it’, over and over. It is indeed as you write, prof!

It is important to always examine what is engaging you, what is attracting YOUR attention. Is it detail, image, tone balance, richness and rolloff? Or is it the band having one hell of a joyous time?

When one cannot hear the latter, for whatever reason, this leaves of course only the former as the experience to be taken away.

Again, no criticism is intended. This is just my experience and of very many others with professional (also meaning ’daily’ across many years), high-end experience. The point from this discussion I think is not to make labels or set up challenges, but simply to work harder at finding the truly musical gear. I have found it is always best to do so by reliance upon recordings of world-class, one-in-a-billion artists, not the second-tier ones signed to audiophile labels. The musicality, the beauty of the top artists will come through regardless of the recording quality, if the system allows it AND the listener is wired to appreciate that. Those who are not wired in this manner do not understand my point and can seldom be ’trained’.

Also, experienced (and famous) recording engineers always say, "It is never the quality of the gear, but the band being on fire that makes the difference."

I recommend Tape Op Magazine -- a studio magazine not beholding to advertisers, with all articles by working pros. It is free and at least one article in each issue seems useful to us audiophiles, about what these men and women hear! By the way, when you write,

"The fact some other people didn’t "recognize" something as musical like yourself isn’t an objective failing on their part, anymore as your failure to find their choice to be musical."

this is wrong. It is indeed an objective failing on their part because I and many others can easily point out the many non-musical differences. Granted, this can take a very long time to do for someone not used to listening for musicality, which is why the world-class artists represent one’s best chance at learning about musicality. Also, read the CD reviews on Amazon, about which performances of an artist to purchase, which ones captured best their special magic.

Best,
Roy

Roy you might be missing our point. When we mean musical it is a system which to many will sound warm, pleasent, non-fatiguing.

Imagine a well prepared dish at a good resturant, take a great steak, one guy might add a dash of pepper and salt, and one guy drowns the the steak with kitchup and A1. 

The issue sure is of course not what tastes good to you but to understand that there are extremes.

In our view a system which is tuned so that everything sounds good including bad recordings, you know you are going to have a system which has rolled off top end and perhaps a slightly fat midrange.

VS.

A system which makes things sound real and life like, if the recording is not good so will be the sound, but of course  a good recording will be glorious.

So of course each person's system is going to mirror their tastes.

If you understand the context of the original question, it will help you understand our point.

Yes we tune our systems to sound natural and we feel that natural is musical,  but in this context it means accurate without being unrealistically bright vs a system which is deliberatly tuned as mentioned above.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

Roy,

I still don’t understand what *you* mean with the term “musical.” I can’t find any other content here aside from you liking certain systems.

And I have to admit I long ago grew uncomfortable with some of the elitism in high end audio where someone declares certain systems “play music” while others do not. My son listens to music on his laptop and iPhone and is enraptured. Are they not “musical” systems? Does he need to learn he is wrong, learn to be dissatisfied and disconnect from his own experience listening and adopt yours?

If instead you give more detail about what specifically you mean by “musical” - actual sonic characteristics - then who knows we may agree. But if it reduces to various forms of “does it move you” then that, as I say is subjective, differs between listeners and therefore not a useful heuristic for identifying anyone being wrong or right about the musical capabilities of a system.