What is Musicality?

The term ‘musicality’ gets used in different ways by different audiophiles, but there is one usage that I find the most informative: A system is described as musical when the sound it produces is perceived by the listener as a GESTALT, rather than a collection of individual elements like resolution, tonal balance, imaging, and so on.

Of course, the likelihood of gestalt perception depends as much on the inclinations of the listener as it does the characteristics of the system. Some people seem naturally inclined to listen analytically, and some systems seem to promote that. Other people seem naturally inclined to listen holistically, and some systems seem to promote that. When a system tends to promote holistic listening, it is often described as “musical.” And that seems to me to be a useful enough adjective to have around.

Hear! Hear!!!

Sorry I couldn't resist!

I am in agreement with Byroncunningham!

The basis of music is the conveyance of emotion. When the sound speaks to your soul, when the absolute beauty of the composition moves the listener to tears, then the emotion originally inherent in the composition is coming through to you, and that is musicality. You know it when you hear it; unfortunately you do not hear it very often, actually only very rarely.
It is not necessarily about the quality of the rig, although it certainly *can* be. Has much more to do with system synergy and of course the depth perception of the listener, because not everyone, actually only the gifted few, actually "get it".

I was not going to enter into this discussion, and I am certainly not going to try to narrow down a definition of "musicality." Even the dictionary doesn't try to do that by the way, in most of them "musicality" is not even given a separate entry - it is listed as the noun form of the adjective "musical."

That aside, I do feel compelled to respond to a couple of comments made here about how professional musicians listen. Particularly Kijanki's "Are you suggesting that musicians are better listeners? Nothing can be further from the truth." This statement is completely absurd on the face of it. One cannot become a professional musician without VERY highly developed critical listening skills - this should go without saying. In fact, these skills go quite far beyond those required to analyze the sound of an audio system, and those that do not have them do not make it as professionals.

Jax2 is on the right track when he says "they listen in a completely different way than I do and are far more particular about content," and also "critical listening of a system, for me is the antithesis of enjoying music."

A couple of comments from my perspective as a professional performer. First, all performers are very aware of the shortcomings of the recording/playback process - there is not now, and probably never will be, any way to record and play back music in such a way that it remotely resembles the live event to our ears. And since we experience the live event literally on a daily basis, the very best system in existence falls far short. This is probably the main reason why some audiophiles have the impression that many professionals don't "get" high end audio. We tend to "listen through" the limitations of the recording/playback system, in a way similar to how some audiophiles talk about "listening through" distortions. The quality of the system/recording is simply not nearly as high a listening priority for us, either for work or pleasure. The music itself and the performance of it is a far higher priority in both cases.

That said, there are many musicians such as myself who do appreciate a good high quality system, but the priority will always be on the music (and the music-making), not the equipment. IMO, this should be true of anyone listening to music, whether they call themselves an audiophile or not. If the equipment and/or recording quality becomes more important than the music, than the priorities (musical ones, anyway) have been misplaced. If I do not like a performance, I won't listen to it for pleasure, no matter how excellent the recording quality and/or the system it is played on (I might have to listen to it for study purposes, but that is a separate thing, and as I said the listening in that case would be much more critical than an audiophile listening to equipment). On the other hand, as professionals our much deeper knowledge of the music gives us much more pleasure in listening to a great performance, even if it is a bad recording played on a crappy system.

So those are some of the reasons many musicians do not bother to get into some of the purely technical details of audio playback that many audiophiles love to go crazy over. I could of course elaborate much further on any of the above comments if anyone cares, but I'll shut up for now.