Do you play an instrument? Helps in speaker eval?

I hear differences in cables, etc. in my tweaked and fussed over hifi, and the system is revealing enough to notice gigantic differences among all recordings...I doubt this is from a lifetime of playing music and hearing shows, it's more about listening closely and giving a crap. I'm sensitive to bad live acoustic guitar sound because it bugs me, so I've been on a never ending search for an acoustic pickup system that I like (I've owned too many that are just "OK")...and recently found one that feels good (LR Baggs "Anthem"). I think my experience just makes me more pissed when I'm listening to a show where the sound sucks, or a lame stereo someplace.

My kids play some instruments (Harp and so on...), their music teacher made some vinyl recordings in the 80's, brought them to my house and we played them ...the comment was: "Yes, that's it"
It was recorded in a small, professional studio with the instruments they still own today and use, the ambiance was in a way comparable to real life condition....I tried to buy more records as a time document but with digital age most disappeared ..

Drums and percussion. And I listen for how honest the toms sound - whether I can hear them being struck. Also, does the bass drum have its individual timbre? or does it just sound like a generic thump? Cymbals should have their own location and soundstage. I get frustrated when I hear cymbals disappear into a generic wash of sound, or compressed down to the point where the hi-hat is the same volume as the crash.

I've played clarinet since age 7, guitar and bass guitar since 14, took piano lessons, attended concerts (both acoustic and electric). Yes, I think it helps in evaluating speakers (or cables, etc) to play an instrument, and its fine to say there is only one "absolute" sound as reference (live, unamplified music). Here's the problem I have though when everyone is talking about an absolute reference standard....do you hear the same way I do, or anyone else for that matter? Who has presbycussis? Do you carry expectations from reading reviews in magazines or from word of mouth into your listening to different speakers or cable? Just saying there are many other factors that influence how we perceive music or equipment. Having played an instrument (s) is just one of them.

I play the drums, but the experience most applicable to my audiophile hobby is recording in a professional studio. It's important to remember that in many cases 'faithful' reproduction requires figuring out what the producer and sound engineer want the listener to hear, not what the actual instrument sounded like if you heard it from a normal listening position.

In one case I had kick drum that rang no matter what we did to deaden it, so it was fixed in post production. In another case the lead guitar was re-recorded several weeks after we had finished because they thought the sound wasn't quite right.

This may not be true in every case, but remember that even if the musicians are playing at the same time most of the instruments are fully isolated from each other and are subsequently mixed down to two channels. Prior to that all manner of tweaking can be done to achieve a coherent sound that the producer is trying to achieve.

Live music is recorded similarly, where the instruments and vocals are singley mic'd and then subsequently mixed down. Area mic's on modern recordings are less common. And remember that the sound engineer has control over instrument placement in three dimensions.

As far as drums go, modern samples are very sophisticated and many artists use triggers. Striking the head triggers a sample, the actual acoustic sound never gets recorded.

To my ears, knowing that the circumstances and equipment invoked in the recorded process are (mostly) unknown, I appreciate recordings and systems that can reproduce realistic dynamics. As one poster mentioned above, instruments coming at the listener at the same volume denote either compression during production or lack of fidelity in the reproduction.