So what is good? I read about experts correcting intonation by lining toneholes with shim material or nail polish, balancing saxophone response by swelling or reducing local areas of necks by 0.1mm increments. How on earth do they play accurately enough to distinguish the effects? Surely the unavoidable ambient variations in temperature, pressure, humidity and personal physiognomy swamp any such tiddly adjustments. If you read Benade on acoustics he spends a large proportion of his time ensuring comparative, repeatable conditions against which to test his theory, conditions which are never duplicated in the performance arena. OK, so the comparisons stand even if the base conditions change, but if things change what is the point of infinitesimal accuracy? I am sure that there must be people in the world who can recognise the differences such changes make, but they must be a miniscule proportion of musicians never mind of the general population. And what torture these hyper-sensitive people must suffer amongst the mellée of noises propagated by modern society. Am I too cynical when I class such phenomena with gold plated loud speaker wire and go faster stripes? Maybe hyper-sensitive applications like small groups where beat frequencies may be set up, are made easier to control the more accurately the intonation of individual instruments is matched, but how often are conditions such that the audience can notice any difference in performance?
I am fully prepared to concede that such instrumental niceties are possible and that there are people who have skill enough to exploit them, but I cannot help believing that most of the time the situation is analogous to the 'Mobil Economy Run' where a Ford Cortina can be driven for 85 miles on a gallon of petrol (or whatever) if it is tuned finely enough and the driver is skillful enough and the conditions are ideal and the route is selected. Possible, but outside the realm of normal existence.
Meantime, if I can get most of the right notes, in roughly the right order, I shall have made a vast improvement.