[nagrom]

I suspect that this is a question of energy. At high energies, it's difficult/impossible to stop a particle, so you place a row of scintillators out, bend the charged particle path using a magnetic field and measure its displacement (and thus velocity and thus energy).

At lower energies, you can stop the particle in, e.g. an NaI detector which is known as calorimetry. Typically, of course, cosmic rays are quite high energy and given the low rate of muon interaction calorimetry is difficult/impossible. A HEP physicist may use both techniques, e.g. by using heavy-metal plates to cause an EM cascade and measure the resultant shower in a crystalline detector. But typically when one talks of scintillator devices (and almost certainly in the case of cosmic rays) one talks of tracking and measuring deflection in magnetic fields if wanting to measure the energy.