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.
