Do you think audiophiles have a much deeper appreciation of music than the general public?

No.  A musicophile does.

I believe that there are a lot more people who appreciate music and out of them audiophiles are much much less and far in between.

I really don't care for the term "audiophile" as it has a connotation of someone with more money than sense. I prefer to describe myself as a "hifi enthusiast".  I feel hifi enthusiasts  appreciate music much more than the general population.  In the general population I know of very few people who listen to classical, opera, or jazz.  All of my hifi friends buy and listen to these genres.  All of my hifi friends scope out new music in what Americans refer to as "world music". All of the people that I know and desribe as hifi'ers regularly listen to Coltrane and Miles.  In the general population these names are not even know.

With a real good system you can hear the words being sung.  Most people don't care about lyrics, they care about the "hooks".  Those people miss out on what the artist was trying to communicate.  Paul Simon, listening to his music on a car radio, commented that it didn't even sound like his music.  With a good system you can hear all instruments being play, readily recognize the voice of the backup singer, etc.

The problem here might be how we define "audiophile" and "hifi enthusiast" .
 

Yep, yep I do and I know it's true ;')

Edited by Hi-Finthen - 10/3/12 at 5:47pm

Well, when I started, all I know were the musicians on the radio. I learned about baroque, classical, jazz, Horowitz, Liszt, Bach, canon, Vivaldi, etc... from reading Stereophile and TAS. And which are bad, good and great recordings.

You can't learn about music by reading articles about wires!

I know far too many audiophiles who have bad bad taste in music to agree with that.

A wire article that teaches you about music.

 

Audiophile periodicals can (sometimes) point out well recorded, mixed or mastered albums (or those purported to be.)  They aren't very good repositories of musical information, and there are a wealth of sources out there that are far more accurate and well informed about music, from the baroque age to the modern era.  One of my favorites as a classical pianist is clavier - I still have all the back issues dating back to the '40's and will occasionally pick up snippets of valuable info that 20 years of professional training haven't imparted. 

To elaborate on my original short answer - audiophiles are hi-fi enthusiasts.  This sometimes goes hand in hand with being a musical enthusiast but I have not seen a significantly higher percentage of well-versed musicophiles among audiophiles than among the general populace.  

Those periodicals were not just about wires or equipment for that matter. Contribute rather than criticize where people learn about audio and music in general, there are already too many critical experts here.

I think a lot of magazines are just there to validate the tastes of their readership, not cultivate it. I've found much better musical info by talking to musicians and amateur musicologists than in any magazine. Likewise, I've found better info about the hifi hobby from knowledgeable enthusiasts and pro engineers than in audio magazines.

I haven't seen much of a correllation between audiophiles and well recorded music either. A lot of them seem to focus on 14KT gold Japanese CDs and fancy vinyl reissues of music from the late 70s that wasn't all that well recorded in the first place.

I would say that, audiophiles have a deeper (than your average person) appreciation for the recordings and the equipment involved in the playback of music.