As a reviewer, I honestly have a hard time understanding how things sound based on those terms. To me, and I specifically mean “to me personally, myself and just myself”, those terms are meaningless. I am not attacking anyone using them and I think everyone should be completely free to express themselves however they see fit, but I think those terms are just meaningless and give you absolutely no indication on what to expect in terms of how things sound but in some very broad, general and loosely identifiable way. Again, I would like to stress this is my personal opinion and that’s the reason why I never use them, I do not want anyone to feel attacked by my position.
The way that I see it, this two terms are used by one category of people: those who do not want a faithful reproduction of the sound, but want to enjoy music the way they like. That’s entirely, perfectly fine and that’s a choice as valid as any other. As an audiophile, though, my personal aim is to get as close to the original sound as possible, so what I look for is “clinical” (flat frequency response, no added colouration) instead of “musical” (with added emphasis on some part of the spectrum, which usually means bass and lower midrange). That’s not always the case, though, an as these terms are broad in definition everyone uses them with their very own meaning, making things more difficult to understand as few people explain what meaning they attribute to the terms.
As far as I know, that means nothing and it’s just a way of saying “I like how it sounds”.
Again, as far as I know, these are just very broad terms with little specific information.
So, as others pointed out in this discussion as well, the main issue is that everybody uses words without clarifying what meaning they attribute to them, making it almost impossible to understand what they are talking about in a specific, detailed way. Most of the audiophile discourse I’ve witnessed is based on loose definitions and broad terms because of two facts: the first one is the inherent difficulty for humans to describe sounds. It’s really easy to describe colours and images, but it’s really hard to describe anything else: sounds, smells, physical sensations, tastes. That’s in part due to the poor education we are given in regards to how to describe these things (e.g. a vast majority of us was taught how to draw, use colours, look at paintings etc but very few have had specific education regarding sounds, tastes, smells etc). In part it’s because as humans, our main sensory organs are eyes and we are basically hard-wired to process images much better than anything else.
The second thing is that there is directly correlated to the first, and that’s that there is no formal way to describe sounds as precisely as you can describe images - we just lack the words to do so. You can say “this is red” and it’s unequivocal. You can’t say “this sounds red”. So it’s always a matter of saying “look, I use the word X to describe this, which you can probably hear if you listen to this track using this gear”.
On top of that, and just for the sake of completeness, I find that there are also two other kinds of people: people who have no clue of what they’re talking about and “scammers”. The former is totally fine, as long as they realise they need to learn their stuff (“there is no such a thing as a right to an opinion, there is only a right to an informed opinion”). I mean, everyone neds to start from somewhere, right? Those I addressed as “scammers” may not really be such and this is indeed a misuse of the word (also caused by me not being a native English speaker), but the point I wanted to get across is that there are those who use broad terms so they can trick the uneducated audience into finding things in sound that may or may not be there. It’s a bit like horoscopes: they’re so broad and general that anyone can find something in them.
To wrap things up, I think the discussion would be benefited if we stopped using broad terms altogether or if we provided clear explanations of what the meaning is to us. The alternative is to continue to not understand each other. My two cents, of course!
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and with experience I appreciate even more the things I go back to as staples!