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

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.

"Musicality" is clearly not a technical term - how could it be? Of course that applies to a lot of audiophile jargon, to varying degrees. 

Best to keep it simple. I think it usually means "I really like this", or in the context of direct comparisons, it can be applied to one component to put the other component down "softly" - rather than a flat out "I think that one sounds bad". Unfortunately most of us spend too many words skirting around what we REALLY think of something. 

"musicality" is a term not only in the audiophile lingua...

It is a term for maestro, musician teachings and acousticians ...

It is a subjective quality which react to objective parameters change , be it the hands and fingers  of a violonist or the tuning of a Helmholtz resonators or an EQ digital or analog  or a  specific way to spoke a language ...

Then calling "musicality" an arbitrary meaningless word derived from marketing is not false but it is not true either, it is confusing the informed meaning of the words with the uninformed use ...

Your description refer to the gear consumers reviewers not to his more constrainted use in music and small room acoustics courses or in achitecture of great Hall were musicality had a different more precise meaning ......

It is not because we cannot correlate a word to his objective complex set of parameters that the word means almost nothing save an opinion ... There exist informed opinions ...

"musicality" has nothing to do with the branded names behind gear choices, here the word reflect a mere buyers opinion... Like all the cliches about tubes and S.S. or analog versus digital etc ...

"Musicality" is clearly not a technical term - how could it be? Of course that applies to a lot of audiophile jargon, to varying degrees.

Best to keep it simple. I think it usually means "I really like this", or in the context of direct comparisons, it can be applied to one component to put the other component down "softly" - rather than a flat out "I think that one sounds bad". Unfortunately most of us spend too many words skirting around what we REALLY think of something.

My little Leben 300 is more musical than a dozen other amps I've owned. The music just flows out of it. Some amps control more than others but maybe that's what some speakers need.

This is a difficult topic to nail down.

It started for me in high school in the 70s, where we obsessed about specs—THD, bandwidth. Late 80s was post specs—perceived accuracy compared to live, for me based a lot on written reviews of golden ears types. Now, its simply what sounds enjoyable. Smooth and capable of loud at no more than $1,500 per component. Imaging is not important to me, so I dont have to spend for that.

So, for me, ‘musical’ is what makes me feel good when I hear it. Most of that means not a lot of energy in the high frequencies such as crash cymbals and aggressive digital compression during mastering—and re-mastering.