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

Electrical and mechanical matching of gear need the ears (acoustics) ...

And it is less about our taste than about the parameters of our ears coupled to the parameters of the system/room ...

If i want to tune my speakers with vibrations control with a damping load which must be fine tuned under 100 gram of precision for an optimal result , be it with springs or with a sandwich of various materials we must use our ears to fine tune it ..

if we want to pick an amplifier over another amplifier  choice we must put them in a specfic room and couple them with specific speakers for our ears to judge ...Electricals specs matching are not enough and will not tell all the story to be told  ... And it is less about taste than about our ears catching in an optimal way the   acoustic factors at play with this speakers room or this other one ... Taste there is, but taste it is not ....

Taste in audio, contrary to all the marketing aiming at the consumers ignorance, is secondary ; acoustics and psycho-acoustics knowledge primary ...

All that i described is basic...I dont know way much than you for sure and perhaps less on many others aspects but at least i know that ...

First step must be electrical/mechanical matching. Acoustical matchimg is another and different issue that mainly depends ( everything the same ) of what we like it/taste..

So, my take is that "musical" has correlation with objective metrics, yet is heavily influenced by specific individual hearing system peculiarities, and specific gear that specific music piece was recorded and produced with.

You are right for the part i underline ...

But a good designed amplifier will be TESTED for optimal results and for specific ears in a dedicated acoustic room designed around the chosen speakers and the specific ears ...

Then a well designed speakers will play everything well and this nevermind the styles of music ...

But in a non dedicated room , with inferior design , we can imagine customers picking different amplifiers for different music styles ... But this reflect a lack in design or a lack in room acoustics or the two at the same time ... If not a bad synergy between each gear pieces and between the speakers and the room ...

And for your observation that we must buy the same gear than the recording studio, it reflect a confusion and the conflating of the recorded spatial acoustic information and timbre parameters with the different vehicles and coding (digital/analog,dac versus vinyl) but acoustics information can be coded but is not a code , it is a perceived qualia ...Then we must instead of buying the same gear pieces as the recording studio created a better room acoustics for ourself then putting ourself in position for the recreation of the original acoustics information (qualia) in our listening room ... And also buying a BACCH filters DSP to beat even any studio gear which work without them ...

Psycho-acoustics rule the gear, not the reverse... And taste must be educated and rules nothing but only marketing, or sleepwalking consumers , not audio design or experience...

Acoustics moves not only the brain but the heart, it is why acoustics as medecine is an art based on sciences as physics and neurophysiology of hearing not only a technology ...

The most important core fact in acoustics is the active human body producing sounds and perceiving them at the same time ....It is speech/music with his social motivation (meanings) .... We were trained by evolution forces to perceive meaningful natural sounds but more than that we created ourself meaningful sounds ...Our hearing system live then in his own time dimension and cannot be described and explaimed by linear mappings .. Meaning is a non linear symbolic form, it is an embodied form...... I will stop philosophy here ... 😊

«Men are walking idea  born from real women»-- Anonymus midwife 👩‍⚕️

Dear @fair : " Also, preferred most often listened to music genres, and even specific artists. " as with your friend mentioned.

Perhaps in those old days (n 1997 as Plinius. ) those kind of electronics behavior could happened but today electronics/audio items normally performs almost evenly it does not matters the genre of MUSIC or artist. A good design means that: evenly quality performance levels where MUSIC genre/artist is not an issue.

" yet it’s the differences that make them unique enough for a specific buyer to choose. "

" yet is heavily influenced by specific individual hearing system peculiarities, "

Key words on those statements: UNIQUE nad SPËCIFIC INDIVIDUAL,

From those words came what each one of us ( individual and unique ) like/taste.

As you said: " there are common qualities that have to be present in all of them " but the taste is totally specific and unique/individual to each one of us.

Now the TASTE word is fully charged ( conscious or not. ) at different levels in each one of us of what almost all posted in the thread as:  @mapman ​@hilde45 ​@mulveling ​@mahgister including me.

Designers/manufacturers are there too.

There is no objectivity over subjectivity but a blended " history " and exist several limitations at both sides.

Till today does not exist a precise measurements that can tell us ( bullet proof. ) why we like what we like and audio item specs alone can’t tell us if that audio item will match our taste till we tasted.

Not even by psycho-acoustics because neurologists and scientifics confirm that no one no human being knows in true and with facts not even the 25% of the human being operation brain and what surrounded it.

So science shows us answers totally incomplete because can’t advance over that 25% with almost useless conclusions. There is no knowledge science after that. Maybe in the future. The MUSIC therapies is an example because it function with some people and not with other similar persons.

The fully operation of the whole human being is truly unknow, we know maybe more from the study of Universe that our organism/brain.

Yes TASTE is all what we can imagine is charged.

R.

Dear R.

Now that you have clarified a bit your posts i can concur with almost of all you just said ...

I will only add that what you call "taste" is in my understanding a set of biases mostly acquired by our own audio,acoustic,musical personal history ...But acuired by the haphazard of our own history they are not completely informed ...

These "tastes" which are uninformed biases or untrained biases mostly must be educated by acoustics and psycho-acoustic  concepts and experiments not by gear buyings upgrades collections ...That is my point ...

You are right also about this :

The fully operation of the whole human being is truly unknow, we know maybe more from the study of Universe that our organism/brain.

But this does not means that we are stuck with our innate or acquired  "taste" as they are in audio experience, because as audiophile we must train ourself replacing uninformed biases by more educated one ...

You are right about hearing science , which is technologically more and more spectacular but we dont know yet how we hear audible Qualia or sounds ... There is many hearing competing theories ... The Fourier mapping of sound so powerful it is must  not to be confused with the real territory...

Then we will end our divergence of opinion if you understand that by : "taste" i understand myself uninformed biases; then i reject them as a basis in audio design and acoustic experience ... I myself can read your defense of "taste" rights then as the defense of informed biases ... If so we could begin to understand each other ...

My deepest respect and i apologized for being opinionated .... 😊

Dear @mahgister, @rauliruegas, we agree on about 75%, yet there is still a remaining topic of the gear that musicians, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers use.

These music professionals pick the gear according to their own at times very peculiar preferences, and tune the stages of recording/mixing/mastering chain in very specific ways: sometimes for a whole album, sometimes for a specific song, and sometimes just for a short music phrase.

Also, their hearing systems are quite different from each other and from the listeners’, albeit accomplished professionals tend to know well how to account for and somewhat compensate those differences.

To give you a couple of simple examples of just one stage of the chain - mixing studio monitors:

Michael Cretu (Enigma) used large Quested monitors for his album Love Sensuality Devotion. These monitors were known for their high power and low harmonic distortion across the full audio spectrum, yet their woofers were massive and relatively underdamped - they started slowly and kept going for a split second after a bass tone was already over. For the kind of music that Michael Cretu created, this was beneficial. It emphasized the smooth continuous dreamy aspects of his music.

Boris Blank from Yello chose PSI Audio A21-M studio monitor for mixing his group’s album Toy. In addition to also being powerful, full range, and low-distorting, the PSIs are especially known for their precise response in time domain. Their group delay is surprisingly stable across the frequency range, and they start and stop on a dime. Fittingly, songs on this album are full of intricately interwoven sharp transients, which would be significantly more difficult to get right on less precise studio monitors.

When it gets to listening, Michael Cretu’s music would feel more natural on speakers resembling Quested - smooth, eager to fill out short pauses between notes. Boris Blank’s mixes world probably sound less exciting on such "super-smooth" speakers, yet would come to life on sharp-hitting "analytical" speakers. So here you have it - the artists preferences in sound and corresponding gear choices do matter!