Accurate vs Musical

Speakers should reproduce accurately the music contained on the recording. Speakers should not be another musical instrument imposed on top of the recorded music.
Some prefer one version of speaker to the other. You chose which fits your vision and forget the terms that audiophiles use.

I've always viewed it this way:

Accurate or transparent is what I like and want. Why? Because I've played music all of my life, and when I'm trying to learn a song, I want to hear what the each individual part is. What's the rhythm guitar doing, the lead, the keyboards. Consequently I grown accustomed to listening this way all of the time. I enjoy my music that way.

Musical is more blended and not necessarily that detailed. A person can sit back and enjoy the song as a whole without needing to or wanting to disect it.

Two examples of this in cables are the Stereovox HDXV (or Kimber D-60) digital cable (accurate) versus the MIT Digital Reference (musical), and more recently the new Basis power cord (extremely accurate) versus the Kubala-Sosna Emotion (musical).

Both accurate and musical are good, it comes down to this, when you sit down and listen to music, what's your pleasure?

All speakers lose their ability to be accurate once placed in a listening room. Early reflections, modal nodes, etc., all play a part in reducing the realism to a certain degree even if the speaker is 100 percent true to source.

Also, IMO, a more accurate speaker has the potential for being less musical since the accuracy highlights any flaws in the system, and in some instances make them unbearable - especially with digital sources. This is one reason some people tend to think not so highly of Thiels.

So if you're making a buying decision, the equipment connected upstream will be more of a factor in accuracy - at least the accuracy you are looking for - than the speakers' resolving ability.

The ideal would be a system that recreates, at the listener's ear, the exact waveforms of the performance that the artists originally performed or intended (specifying "intended" to take into account multitrack and synthesized recordings that never had an "original performance"). Frankly, that's way beyond our technology today.

The next best thing is to receate the PERCEPTION that the artists intended. This is more reasonably approachable, but requires study and research into "what matters" and "what doesn't". Much of what gets touted as demonstrating "accuracy" really doesn't matter very much, and much of what's ingnored does.

If we are measuring the things that matter, "accurate" and "musical" are the same.

Duke

"BTW “accurate” is “musical” when the recording is!" - pbb

Well said