Musical?

Musical means it sounds really good and you're really happy with the sound your system is reproducing. If you're an audiophile, that means it's not quite right and you're not listening quite close enough, your're not thinkng or feeling properly or you're just confused. If you feel too satisfied you're not doing it right. Try listening very discernably and you'll find a reason to be unhappy - then you'll know you're an audiophile. I think you can do this since many of us have and it's really quite easy. Hope this helps and happy second quessing.

"Musical" means "Hey, I like this one so much, I can't be bothered with trying to explain why." It's a pretty recent descriptor of choice, along the lines of "sounds more like music, less like hifi." Whatever. By itself, it doesn't convey any more information than making contented grunting noises does. To be more charitable, it conveys the sense of "getting it right," even though the piece might not be the ultimate in one or more specific audiophile qualities. The problem is, "getting it right" totally depends on your personal preferences. It's often hard enough to interpret people's usage of terms like "forward," "warm," "compressed"... The word "musical" is pretty much off the charts in terms of subjectivity.

That said, I liked Noble's answer, too.

It's definitely a non-audiophile way of thinking. If a component is "musical" you can listen to and feel the emotion of the music without thinking about the system your hearing it on. I sometimes get this feeling in my 96 Jetta but rarely when planted squarely in the sweetspot of my listening room.

'Musical' means you're in the right mood and concentrated enough to listen to the music you're playing, and not the equipment is is played on. One day my set sounds very 'musical', the other day I only listen to the system's weaknesses. Funny, but true: my in-car cd-changer is more often 'musical' than my expensive, pampered audiophile system.......

Musical = hear music....vs....analytical = hear system and "sound" of recording.

Here is a continuum:
clock radio (hear music only)....................studio monitors (hear system only)

**Musical - the forest not the trees**
You hear the musician's emotions, feelings and expressiveness in what they are playing.

**Analytical - the trees not the forest**
you hear the musician's technique and the quality of the recording. You hear the finest details such as door squeaks, people farting, and singers swallowing their saliva. IMO analytical will always lead to unhappiness as you hear too much. All the faults in the system are exposed since you are listening to the system not the music and no system is perfect. Also results in not listening to a lot of music because of bad sound quality.
IMHO there is some kind of relationship between money spent and systems becoming more analytical. As if, for spending a lot of money you better gets lots of detail to get your money's worth. A corollary would be boomy bass when people buy a subwoofer. They want to hear what their money just bought them.

Musical does not have to mean distorted or euphonic as in poor measuring SET's. You can have "musical" with flat F-R speakers and low distortion electronics the key is that they aren't too revealing. Finding the balance between revealing too much and too little is the trick.