Apparently, Kevin, neither are mine, and I've had gobs of formal musical training AND have had a moderately successful career as a professional musician:   clubs, coffeehouses, concerts, television. To my ear, any differences between "pure" tuning and equal temperament are too subtle to be of any concern, and to the vast majority of professional, career musicians, they are not.

Discussions of this kind, where some folks make a big deal out of how much holier "pure" temperament is, remind me of a guy I knew when I was studying music at the Cornish College of the Arts (in Seattle). This person was also a music student at Cornish. Very prissy type. He once announced that he was going to have to move to a different apartment (flat) because his refrigerator hummed in D and the buses went by in C#—and it kept waking him up at night! Thank God I'm not that "sensitive!" Life could really be Hell!

Actually, I'm sure he was putting on ("More sensitive than thou, you mere mortal!"). He really wasn't that great a musician.

I have very good relative pitch. I can identify intervals. If you were to play a single note, I couldn't tell you with precision what note it was, but if you were to follow it with another note, I could say, "That's a major third" or whatever. Perfect pitch is when one can tap a wine glass and accurately identify the ring as, say, an octave above Middle C.

Lest fear and confusion inhibit aspiring beginners, I'd say just don't worry about it!

Don Firth