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


Once in awhile, I hear the term 'this amp is more musical' for some amps. To describe sound, I know there is 'imaging' and 'sound stage'. What exactly is meant by 'more musical' when used to describe amp?

dman777

I read poetry...And for those who love poetry as me this fact, does not nullify the other facts, and it does not means that in audio "musicality ", for a musician, a designer, and acoustician or an audiophile, does not implies acoustics and mechanical and electrical parameters controls of the system/room and even the use of psychoacoustics parameters of the design "musicality" as explained by atmasphere about harmonics and "distortion" ...And it also implies our own heart feelings listening music and our brain acoustic biases history too .... As Michelangelo designing architecture implies these objective knowledge and his subjective feeling and perceptive history in his master pieces ...

Now if we means "musicality" in music , as a musician, a designer and an acoustician or as a music lover it is related first to the heart feelings and the brain biases history but also in second to the acoustics parameters and to our brain acoustic biases history...Any pianist test the piano objective health before playing and the acoustic Hall value before playing if he can ...

In the two cases the objective and subjective factors meet together in the same individual body/brain , mine for example when i optimize my system, listening a quartet music to test it and first appreciate the musical results in the two aspects acoustical and musical in my room for my heart as in classical or jazz music .....

i pick my gear pieces by statistical reviews impressions and then i optimize it in my room/system .. I cannot review it in a showroom with different pieces, different room than mine anyway...my taste has little to do with the gear choices ...I use subjective reviews and objective parameters to evaluate a possible synergy.. ... The rest is a failed or succeeding optimization and embedding process where for sure my acquired and innate biases play a great role , call them my taste if you want , but i use mainly mechanical, electrical and acoustical facts to test my gear with my "taste" .........

Then attacking the motives of an engineer as atmasphere with his understanding of music or poetry is beside the point made ...I presume atmasphere love classical music and jazz ...He seems to know psychoacoustics at least ...That matter a lot ...

 

As said the great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, also a poet : «Nothing really important can be proved ». this sentence this maxim was aimed not only for mathematics but for anything in life ...

The second greatest mathematician of the century perhaps , Cantor , wrote that « the essence of Mathematics is pure freedom and creativity »..

Now take these two sentences together to understand what they means together...

They means that in mathematics as in life some deep problem cannot be solved in the past paradigm, as the parallell postulate , or the question of the actual infinite, for example , we must them not trying to solve the problem with a demonstration and a proof which are not possible anyway; in the opposite we must create first a new world to SHOW the hidden value of these problems as Cantor did , as Lobatchevsky or Bolyai did ...

It was no more a mere proof mechanism in a known world first but the heart feeling and the mind feeling about a new world , a new conceptual scheme living as an organism in the spirit of any genius; then first and last more a perception than a logical proof ...

Then even in mathematics the feeling and the concepts play together , as in acoustic, and as in music understanding, or as in any human endeavor ...

Pure reactive subjective romantism or pure objective materialism are blind alleys, the spiritual takes over the body and the heart together ... As illustrated by Goethe or William Blake in very different ways ...

 

We cannot prove God exist or anything of real value as love or Beauty, or musical or mathematical truth; but we can create a world for us together where these ca be perceived ...

 

«Any fact need a world where it is possible for it to exist»-- Anonymus Sherlock Holmes reader 🕵️‍♀️

«All trees dont grow above sand»-- Anonymus botanist

Then in "musical", taste there is, acquired and innate;but it is not about taste...It is also about truth ...

I think that atmasphere is nearer Rembrandt in his craftmanship than to the mechanical recipe of Sherwin-Williams paint colors...If you do not think so, then it is better to buy a cheap chinese  made product, so good it could be, i dont think it will rival atmasphere craftmanship in class d or in tubes design ... 

 

Engineer types explaining musicality.

Like Sherwin-Williams explaining Rembrandt.

Read Keats aloud and get back to me

Engineer types explaining musicality.

@jpwarren58 Yeah, sometimes we engineering types do that.

It probably helps to correlate engineering to the rules of human hearing,  combined with actually playing real instruments. Some engineers do this and others are only by the book.

What I'm saying is that you can design for good specs or design to best honor the rules of human hearing. SET guys know what I'm talking about, although personally I think SETs fall short of the mark.

@mahgister  : First the OP is about musical and not musicality and seconddddddd you have a misunderstood  that I don't accept " psychoaoutics: what I said is that all is included and lives in the Amygdala of      all human beings through our life learning concious and inconcious and informed or uniformed.

 

R.

@mahgister : First the OP is about musical and not musicality and seconddddddd you have a misunderstood that I don’t accept " psychoaoutics: what I said is that all is included and lives in the Amygdala of all human beings through our life learning concious and inconcious and informed or uniformed.

 

 

What means the adjective "musical" and what is musicality are related...

You cannot separate them pointing to the amygdala...

It is preposterous and not even wrong ...Even acoustician use their amygdala for sure ...

In "musical" perception taste there is indeed , acquired or innate, but it is not about mere taste and never had been, it is about acoustics parameters too... The density of air or water is an acoustic parameter with which we can put the conditions of a not so musical experience or a better one (with or/and without the quotation marlk for the word musical )...

Add the heart to the amygdala 😉...It will not change the fact that the experience of sound can be and must be simultaneously an acoustically "musical" experience as well as a simple musical experience ...

it will not change the fact that a designer can add "musicality" to our musical experience when in his design he incorporate and take into account psychoacoustics universal facts about human hearings and tastes innate or acquired ( not only harmonics facts but for example facts about the way human ears interpreat non linearly in his own time domain the information pertaining to the treshold between frequencies and linear time ).

The amygdala existence does not contradict the fact that a designer can use psychoacoustics facts to increase the "musical" acoustic experience coming from his design in a way to improve the experience of music ...

Taste there is for sure, but it is not about mere taste here ...

Why are you so hell bent to gain a point against a common place fact: acoustics is not taste but include subjective taste as starting point with universal neurophisiological facts about hearing adding amygdala will not change that ...

More "musical" experience is not essentially and only about taste, it is about the link between musical concepts and acoustic concepts in a room and in the BODY and with the BODY and the room ( amygdala included) ...

Nobody can negate that an acoustician as a human being with a specifically charged amygdala by his own sound learning history can also study statistically all other owners of amygdala and doing so he can establish laws and principles about what is the "musical" optimum of an acoustic and musical experience in a great Hall or in a small room with a playback system, using atmasphere amplifier design or any other ...He will decide which appear more "musical" to him with not only with his emotions in his amygdala but with his objective knowledge in his conscious brain too ...

Nothing will stop another acoustician to make a new statistical study here to reach more refined conclusion about "musical" perception and musical perception ...

Taste is a always a starting point ,our taste must be educated for an always more "musical" and more musical experience ...

We may explore music with our taste or we may explore ourself with music and sound without our taste limitations and without our preferences as a set of experiments and then opening more windows about what is music and what is "musical" not only for us but for all ( musical anthropologist do so and has done it changing even classical music composition )...

Psychoacoustics explore also all musical productions of all cultures...

Tastes does not define what is "musical" and what is not "musical" at last and at the end ...Human creativity pushing the limits did so with the human active producing sound body/brain with an amygdala inside😊 and with  science never without it  ...

 

Music is processed in the amygdala. But if the brain detects something wrong (speed, distortion, tonal balance and the like) then there is a tipping point where the processing is transferred to the cerebral cortex. At this point a lot of the emotional impact is lost.

When you are auditioning cables or comparing two audio products, the cerebral cortex is where the music is being processed.

The goal of the designer is to keep the musical processing in the limibic system (amygdala) so as to have the most impact on the listener. To do this, the equipment has to be designed to honor and obey the human hearing rules.

For example, the ear uses the higher ordered harmonics to sense sound pressure and also assigns tonality to all harmonics in the same way as it does for musical instruments. So if an amplifier has higher ordered content that isn't masked somehow (the signal cannot do it) then the amp will sound harsh and bright (due to the ear's assignment of the harmonics) and the processing will likely not be in the limbic system.

There are a good number of similar examples- its like negotiating a minefield for success. But if the designer understands the hearing perceptual rules then they can be applied to the design (engineering).