Good question, Detlof, one that I've thought about repeatedly, since so many reviewers use the term. But I agree with Gemini that, if we try to get more specific than saying "musicality" relates to how well a system can reproduce sounds in an emotionally convincing way, it quickly starts to mean different things to different people.
When used by reviewers, "musicality" seems to me to be a cop-out. In fact, when I read something like "Brand B was more musical," I mentally substitute "just sounded better to me." The latter plain-English phrase conveys as much (or as little!) information and doesn't tempt me to engage in a risky mind-reading attempt to figure out specifically what the reviewer heard and liked. I certainly don't think it's easy or always desirable to reduce musical satisfaction to a bunch of discrete components of hearing. But I kind of resent writers implying that they are doing so by sneaking in the term "musical" alongside narrower and more concrete concepts like "low frequency extension" or "dynamic," or even "deep soundstage", "smooth", "transparent", "fast", "dark", "forward", etc. Notice how the hifi-speak practice of turning "musical" into the noun "musicality" further promotes the perception that we are talking about a well-defined property.
To me, "musical" is an emergent property that sums the performance of a system in the areas that are most important to a particular listener. To one listener, "musical" may be strongly related to PRAT and control of microdynamics. To another, it may be more related to a transparent mid-range and timbral fidelity to live music. I'm sure it's actually more complicated than those examples, or writers would describe more analytically what they are hearing, instead of resorting to the term "musicality" because they either don't have the ability to reduce what they're hearing to more specific terms or they don't feel anything is to be gained by doing so. It's hard to imagine, however, how the latter attitude could be constructive in the context of a review.
When used by reviewers, "musicality" seems to me to be a cop-out. In fact, when I read something like "Brand B was more musical," I mentally substitute "just sounded better to me." The latter plain-English phrase conveys as much (or as little!) information and doesn't tempt me to engage in a risky mind-reading attempt to figure out specifically what the reviewer heard and liked. I certainly don't think it's easy or always desirable to reduce musical satisfaction to a bunch of discrete components of hearing. But I kind of resent writers implying that they are doing so by sneaking in the term "musical" alongside narrower and more concrete concepts like "low frequency extension" or "dynamic," or even "deep soundstage", "smooth", "transparent", "fast", "dark", "forward", etc. Notice how the hifi-speak practice of turning "musical" into the noun "musicality" further promotes the perception that we are talking about a well-defined property.
To me, "musical" is an emergent property that sums the performance of a system in the areas that are most important to a particular listener. To one listener, "musical" may be strongly related to PRAT and control of microdynamics. To another, it may be more related to a transparent mid-range and timbral fidelity to live music. I'm sure it's actually more complicated than those examples, or writers would describe more analytically what they are hearing, instead of resorting to the term "musicality" because they either don't have the ability to reduce what they're hearing to more specific terms or they don't feel anything is to be gained by doing so. It's hard to imagine, however, how the latter attitude could be constructive in the context of a review.