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

The sneaky pitfall is taking a waveform that has already happened, reducing it, flipping it out of phase and feeding it back and expecting it to heal a different waveform. The issue is can the ear brain perceive and evaluate this as “ musical “.

One reason why many but not all low to no negative FB designers use time and phase accurate speakers… Always cracks me up when phase accuracy obsession in electronics is swamped by higher order filters downstream.

I do have a lot of respect for Ralph, and i would say his gear is very musical. There are of course others working the same problems w different perspectives… and some probably now know the ANSWERS…thinking in particular of Roger and Charlie ( Ayre )

Best to you Ralph !

@mglik You are right but everyone uses the same hearing perceptual rules. Its a sort of common denominator.

Over time, as a designer you gain experience knowing how the distortion profile looks as compared to how it sounds. It gets to the point that you can predict how the equipment will sound if you have enough of the relevant measurements in front of you. 

There is that old saw about trust your ears not the measurements. That was really true until sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Sometime in that period it became possible to measure the things that really tell what an amplifier (or preamp) might sound like. The knowledge that this is so is scarce, as is the understanding of the significance of some of the measurements.

At any rate, if the design issues I mentioned so far are not observed in a design, it is very likely it will not be deemed 'musical'. It might surprise you, but we've never relied on tuning any of our products by ear. We rely very heavily on measurements. Only after we get what we are looking for do we give it a listen. So far this technique has served us pretty well.

measure and listen = ….. theres even a switch for that on ( only ) the Ayre DAC. IMO it’s really the only approach if the goal is more than flavorizing or worse, blind ( deaf ) objectivism….

I mostly agree on same perceptual rules…until we encounter pitch perfect individuals….

@atmasphere   I’ve noticed than many of the newer vintage of class d amps have extremely low distortion… but still have rising distortion vs frequency often starting around 2khz.  Is it correct to speculate that these amps, whether GanF, Hypex, purifi,  etc. would sound more musical if the distortion increase could be pushed beyond 10 khz rather than just 2khz?

but still have rising distortion vs frequency often starting around 2khz.  Is it correct to speculate that these amps, whether GanF, Hypex, purifi,  etc. would sound more musical if the distortion increase could be pushed beyond 10 khz rather than just 2khz?

@snapsc Yes.