A good portion of the terms there, I can at least have an idea what they are trying to say, but "musical" or "musical and engaging" are meaningless.
When you put a new component into your system, or listen to a system different than your own, ask yourself what are you aware of first: the music? or how the new component/system is making that music? And I don't mean that in a philosophical, self-aware sense of "live music vs. transducer playing a recording of live music". But while the whole newness of the system is still fresh - what is it you pay attention to? That's musicality. Or not.
Some systems have an ability to disappear into a synergistic whole where source, amp and transducer are replaced with something seemingly bigger than the sum of parts. Your focus is only on the image, not the author of the image. The other side of the coin are components that are technically proficient, but make the user more aware of what it is doing with soundstage tricks, imaging sweetspots or over/under emphasis on tonal ranges than getting out of the way. Then you're listening more to the equipment than the music
To paraphrase an old Martin Mull quote, writing about sound reproduction is like using ballet to describe architecture. There's a lack of common idioms and precision between the two so that unless you're intimately familiar with both forms (and I would say most of the general population are not), then there is confusion in terms and language, even though almost everyone has an innate feeling about what is being represented. Play someone a "veiled" sound vs. an "open" one and they'll understand what you're talking about; but few would be able to quantitatively describe the degree of what is the divide between "veiled" vs. "open". It's hugely imprecise; we just seem to be wired that way. You practically need a synesthete to do it. But yet, that's also a primary purpose of these forums.
