Do you play an instrument? Helps in speaker eval?

I used to play piano more than now, have an old 1926 rebuilt Chickering Grand adjacent to the listening room. I would rather play than use my recordings for evaluation as it always reminds me I started too late learning THAT instrument. Chopin would have cried.:( Played several woodwind instruments starting at age 9 through early 20's. None of this helps when evaluating speakers. How music sounds when you're playing it, or in a band or orchestra, has little to do with how it sounds as a listener. Priorities are different for the two.

Listening to as much live music as you can is the best way to hear the true sound of music and evaluate reproduced.

Jazz piano professionally.(Pop and Dance stuff when I want to make $$$ :(
Actually started getting into high end stuff when I was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Started reading Stereophile then and visited various high end shops there. My first high end purchase was a AR ETL-1 turntable with Rega arm I got for cheap in Boston when everyone was stupidly selling their turntables for CD players which were just coming out (late 80's). Playing piano and playing in live situations (with acoustic instruments) definitely helps me know what it should sound like on stuff at home. My ears are fine tuned and I have been through many rounds of equipment with all the tweeks to approach that live sound. The recording quality has improved much since the 80s - especially digital. Just subscribed to MOG this week through my squeezebox, and yes I can hear the high end blurring and softening from 320kbps MP3s - but what a incredible catalog of music to listen too.
I know that's another topic.

I use to be a touring professional Hard Rock singer!, I can play drums good and piano, bass guitar and a little acoustic guitar, I believe being a musician does help evaluating speakers!, cheers to all of you here!

I have pretty deep experience as a classical guitarist. I've played violin and viola at weddings for years. Since around the age of 12 I've played off and on in bands--electric guitar, bass, keyboards, mandolin, dobro and vocals. Failed miserably at drums.

I want my system to sound as natural as possible with acoustic sounds and I think my background helps me discriminate good from bad. I figure such a system should have no problem with electric sounds as well.

It definitely helps form a foundation for the broad spectrum of what live acoustic music sounds like, and for recognizing how the listening position and the size and reverberation of the venue affect the sound. Still, all live music has certain characteristics in common regardless.

I'm a drummer and I noticed there are many drummers on this thread. Drummers don't have an instrument per se, but rather a collection of components. So drummers often function like audiophiles, picking a given set of drums, heads, sticks, and cymbals for a certain venue and style of music or recording assignment. Cymbals also present one of the most complicated and highest frequency overtones of any acoustic instrument, along with violin.

A dramatic change in my LR 2-channel system occurred when my wife and I got married in our house at the end of 2004. We had a guitar/mandolin duo provide live acoustic music. A couple months later my next door neighbor enlisted my help in getting an unobtrusive system for their living room. I got a pair of Mirage OmniSats and matching sub on closeout. I put them into my living room system for break-in and evaluation. My wife noticed right away that they sounded like the musicians were in the room, just like when we got married a couple months previously. My wife is also an accomplished alto and grew up surrounded by and performing in quality music productions.

It turns out that the Mirage Omnisat and omnipolar series featured a radiating pattern and tonal balance based on those same characteristics in live music. In other words, the speakers on average energize a room very similarly to live music, which then means that the tonal balance and primary sound vs. secondary reflections mimic the timings and directions of live music. It works.

There are, of course, many other things to listen for, but having experience playing and listening to music can make you aware of characteristics that others don't listen for. Not just dispersion, but also lack of spurious resonances (that bogus 150-200Hz upper bass hump), treble free of spikes, rolloffs, overshoot, and ringing, etc.

But other musicians pay no attention to those things at all. The late Rick Rosen visited and interviewed some musical giants for his "Rick Visits..." series. I found it interesting when he interviewed vibraphone great Milt Jackson. Here was a guy who had the most luscious tone in all of vibedom. He paid so much attention to his tone that he made his own mallets. Yet his only playback system at home was a kitchen countertop clock radio with built-in CD player. When Rick asked if he ever wanted something with more range and resolution, Milt actually got hostile.

So you can't always make a connection between a musician tone junkie and an audiophile. My theory is that for musicians such as Jackson, you can never get home audio to sound and feel like the live experience, so why try?

I, of course, disagree, and I've found the quest to be rewarding and worthwhile.