A hybrid model comprised of Gaussian Mixtures Models (GMMs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is used to model generic sounds with large intra class perceptual variations. Each class has variable number of mixture components in the GMM. The number of mixture components is derived using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) criterion. The overall performance of the hybrid model was compared against models based on HMMs and GMMs with a fixed number of mixture components across all classes. We show that a hybrid model outperforms both class-based GMMs, HMMs, and GMMs based on fixed number of components. Further, our experiments revealed that the contribution of transitions between states in HMMs has no significant effect on the overall classification performance of generic sounds when large intra class perceptual variations are present among sounds in the training and test datasets. Sounds that show multi-event structure with events that tend to be similar (repetitive) indicated improved performance when modeled with HMMs that can be attributed to HMM?s state transition property. Conversely, GMMs indicate better performance when the sound samples show subtle or no repetitive behavior. These results were validated using the MuscleFish sound database.