Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?


In our thirty years of professional audio system design and setup, we keep on running into two distinctly different types of sound and listeners.

Type One: Detail, clarity, soundstage, the high resolution/accuracy camp. People who fall into this camp are trying to reproduce the absolute sound and use live music as their guide.

Type Two: Musicality camp, who favors tone and listenability over the high resolution camp. Dynamics, spl capabilty, soundstaging are less important. The ability for a system to sound real is less important than the overall sound reproduced "sounds good."

Are there more then this as two distincly different camps?

We favor the real is good and not real is not good philosophy.

Some people who talk about Musicaility complain when a sytem sounds bright with bright music.

In our viewpoint if for example you go to a Wedding with a Live band full of brass instruments like horns, trumpts etc it hurts your ears, shouldn’t you want your system to sound like a mirror of what is really there? Isn’t the idea to bring you back to the recording itself?

Please discuss, you can cite examples of products or systems but keep to the topic of sound and nothing else.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
128x128audiotroy
Simply put, if the nature of the sound produced by your system doesn’t cause a positive emotional response, it really doesn’t matter what camp you are in.  My system allows me an emotional connection with the music, if it didn’t I’d make changes till it did.  I guess that is my definition of ‘musical’.  
@markmendenhall 
"Simply put, if the nature of the sound produced by your system doesn’t cause a positive emotional response, it really doesn’t matter what camp you are in.  My system allows me an emotional connection with the music, if it didn’t I’d make changes till it did.  I guess that is my definition of ‘musical’.  "

Indeed, sir!   I've heard a lot of live music which sounded terrible because the acoustics of the location were terrible.  I've heard a lot of live music which sounded glorious because the acoustics of the venue were at least decent.

With regard to my home audio system, let me say that I'm in the happy camp.
The question is why the gear that is praised by the studio people as closest sounding to life performance, like Benchmark, is called analytical or sterile.  I think that we learned to listen to particular sound that carry certain amount of distortion, noise and coloration while sound closest to life performance is not to our liking.  We like it there, at the venue, but we expect something different at home.  I've read audiogoner's complaint that gear is too resolving and that instruments should not be separated but sounding "together" like a sound blob.  Sure, sound with some distortion and noise can sound more, as you call it, "musical", but shouldn't we learn to listen?  It took me a while to get used to how clean the Benchmark is, but now I think it is very emotionally involving.
It took me a while to get used to how clean the Benchmark is, but now I think it is very emotionally involving.

I don't think that I have ever left a concert at a music hall and thought about how clean the music sounded or how every instrument seemed to separate from the ensemble. To me, that just sounds unnatural and colored...music without the harmonics...the meat stripped from the bone.