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

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!

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.

It seems we dont speak about the same things ... 😊

Welcome here fair by the way ...

There is music as a commercial manufactured product ...

There is music as an artistic recorded event ...

In the first case all is about mixing and the mixing is the true source ...

In the second case, the source is the recording of an organ playing in a church for example ...Here the source is the original lived event captured by the microphone and craftmanship of the recording engineer AT THE SERVICE of the event not his creator in his studio as in the case of music more as a commercial manufactured product in studio ...

The source of music is not the mixing, it is the acoustic atmosphere captured by the mics and translated in our own room system acoustics ...Mixing must be a cherry on a cake not the cake when we recorded a violin or an opera singer...

The recording of acoustics spatial information is lost in all stereo playback ... It is known by acousticians studying the effect of crosstalk on spatial duimensions sound perceptions then on timbre also ... It is the discovery of Dr. Choueiri  who was able to create filters adressing this problem ... Using these filters then any high end system with them not without them can give a quality experience rivalling any studio which did not use them in their system  ...

Heavily mixed music is not ideal by the way and my goal in audio, listening Bach for example, is not retrieving the mix formula of the studio engineer but the acoustic atmosphere specific in the recorded church /organ playing for example .. the mixing engineer here must obey the playing instrument acoustic constrainst in that space ...... I dont need the same audio materials for that as those used by the studio engineer ...Here i will need the BACCH filters with any high end system in a dedicated acoustic room for sure , not the same playback system as in the studio is necessary  ...😁

I dont mind about the mix engineer specific intention by the way , i mind about the organ recorded playing in this or in that church ...The artist here for me is the musician not the engineer ... ( even if any great sound engineer is an artist in his own way ) i listen music and a musician playing Bach not a bunch of mixed sounds ...

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.

This statement was true in the 1960s and 70s. It is not true today- measurement technology, like all technologies, as advanced quite a lot since then. The understanding of what the newer measurements tell us is apparently still lacking; that ignorance causes audiophiles to act as if the above statement were still true.

Dear @fair : " yet there is still a remaining topic of the gear that musicians, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers use. "

As an audiophile and MUSIC lover I almost do not care about but anyway all what happens down there at the end comes in the listener tastes in what we like.

Well, at least that’s my take.

R.

I don’t want to open a new window in this thread because it’s useless and even futile and only want to tell that today is STILL TRUE .

Now could be of some interest for some of us to know for example why some one likes more the Firebird than the Berlioz Fantastique played by the London simphonic orchestra but the other way around two days after the first session all those by live measurements that at the end those bullet proof measurements explanation could be useless for the listener.

Anyway, open a new thread with the facts, examples measurements and the like on that specific issue.

R