Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?

audiotroy,

I think it depends on what we mean by "aggressive." Certainly trumpets have a lot of acoustic power and can play in the high frequencies. In that sense they can sound aggressive. But when it comes to hi fi reproduction, "aggressive" tends to mean overbearing upper/high frequencies, usually an unnaturally sharpened effect.

The effect can make our ears want to "scrunch down" even though the sound level being played back is not particularly loud, and not even approaching the volume of a real brass instrument.

I recently listened to a marching band (was in London, watching changing of the guard) and I was struck by how beautiful and smooth the tone of the horns were - loud yet "relaxed and smooth toned" - the exact opposite of "aggressive" in the hi fi sense.

I have my system dialed in to get a similar presentation for horns, trumpets etc: brilliance, balls, but smooth without the feeling of hi-fi artifice and wanting to "shut down my ears" when they play aggressively - like in real life.

Many brass instruments can have an aggressive sound, do trumpets played in an open space sound melodic vs a harp

That aggressive sound could be from a hifi with too much treble energy. However, it could also be due to age related hearing loss. 

Basically, as sounds get louder, they abruptly go from being inaudible to painfully loud.

Dave and Troy, I do understand your points above, which were:

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

What you propose is a sensible and logical goal. But a system being musical is not about a system tuned so even bad recordings sound great. But the converse will be true.
It is not about a system which makes things sound real and lifelike. But the converse can be true.
It is not about a system being accurate without being unrealistically bright.

seanheiss1 above has it right:

Defining musical is like defining how to dance. We know when someone can dance just like we should know when something is musical. PRaT?

prof, you wrote above:

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.

Thanks for pointing this out, prof. What I have found over the years, quite by surprise, is how most right-brained listeners appreciate most music when played on a musical system. The music may not be their cup of tea, but they, far more often than not, smile and listen and come away feeling like they understand why others could really get into that. This never happens on an amusical system.

When I am describing musicality, I can use only words that convey feelings, emotions, and physical motions like toe-tapping (thanks, ctsooner!). If, like jon_5912, you do not agree, please consider you have received my best advice on what to listen for and what to read into reviews.

Most reviewers have not heard musical systems, or cannot hear when a system is musical, cannot feel when a system is musical. If they did, they would write about that before ever writing about soundstaging, details, dynamics. This is because to anyone able to experience musicality finds that something far more important to report about a product. This is a part of Joe Walsh's message that nitrobob related. Is the music fun even on a car stereo? Again, read magazines like Tape Op to learn the magic that studio pros try to capture, want to reproduce, because they can surely never, ever capture 'reality'.

I would add that we audiophiles could ask women and artistic people's to hear our systems. If their attention is not instantly grabbed and then held by almost any great artist, at a soft volume, that system needs work.

An important aspect of a musical system is finding out, unexpectedly, that we have no motivation to play a different selection right away- drawn in automatically to hearing the entire record or CD. We are lost in the performance, never thinking of its details, image, 'bass' or 'highs', impact, dynamic contrasts... unless one has sat down to listen precisely for those things. this takes ears educated, trained, in ways right-brained people do not get and can seldom be trained. The same goes for power tools, right?

On a truly musical system, those wired emotionally experience feelings best described with words like power and floating and singing and dancing and crying, yelling ,drifting, plunging, spinning, surprising, lilting, laughing, shredding, burning, ... Spontaneous new associations made from associations hidden in the music- concepts only music can communicate.

Words are insufficient to communicate what music does. This is not elitism, but acknowledging those listeners are limited in vocabulary to describe experiences. Ask them!

If you don't get that from your stereo, it is that system's fault IF you initially loved music as a teenager, no matter what the system. On the other hand, if you got into advanced audio because of the tech, then you have to work harder to connect with the music emotionally, hence my earlier advice.

And you are both right, prof and d2girls, about the sound of real horns not being aggressive or bright. Same goes for cymbals. I find these are problems caused mostly by non-time-coherent speakers which literally shred HF transients. This leads to seans' comment of

Basically, as sounds get louder, they abruptly go from being inaudible to painfully loud.

Not true from any real instruments nor from time-coherent speakers. Go to a music store for goodness' sake and ask someone to play something!!

prof, your son who loves his music on his laptop and iPhone is still highly right-brained would be my answer, since teenagers are not rational beings. I think it worth noting that since good musicians are very right-brained, how many of those need or want a fancy hi-fi? It is not a high percentage.

This is what I would ask to try all of us to remember-- the experiences we first had back when we fell in love with music, a place in our lives that experiencing the music came first.

I hope my advice can be a guide out of the tremendous amount of non-musical gear out there. What do I do for our clients? Recommend certain brands and let them see the customer feedback to be, wait for it, always about musicality.

Sorry for the long post, but the variety of musings were nice to see and worth addressing. Thanks!

Best,
Roy

Interesting Roy, but wrong, ask a lot of people who have heard some of the Thiel speakers which are time and phase aligned would disagree with that premise that because a speaker is time and phase aligned it is going to sound smooth or musical.

I am willing to bet there are people here who have heard Thiels and were not finding them to sound musical. 

There have been plenty of Thiel systems that we heard in fact , sold Thiels for years, and did find combinations of electronics which made them sing, at the time a set of CS 2.3 or CS 2.4 on a Vac PA 100, Bat VK3i made an amazing sound 

If you have a recording which captures live music in its rawest form, or the recording is not a good one, some of the earliest Telarc discs for example on a system which has good high frequency extension is going to sound bright, if it is on the recording, however, if you have a system that rolls off the top end you are going to experience that recording in a totally different light. 

Dave and  Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

They were indeed time-coherent (across a limited range) but that is their only similarity to my work, to Dunlavy, Vandersteen, and Meadowlark.

And you are indeed right about finding other gear to make them sing. Great! The difficulty of said search speaks to the speaker's level of muscality.

One may eventually find 'this gear' exhibits strong colorations in many other systems. Finding universality to the sound of a product among people's comments and reviews is a good thing, before deciding to give it a go.