While I enjoy having a great sound piped to my ears, and it does help with playing, my first priority is to make sure I sound good to the audience. Everything else is secondary.

In other words, I make my patches based on how they sound through my P.A. and not through anything else. Then I find a monitoring system that sounds good without having to change the patch at all.

It's all a matter of taste, of course, but I'm very pleased with my little Alto TS110a. Then again, I haven't yet heard a P.A.-type speaker that sounded bad with my rig.

So, I suppose if you're careful and patient enough to get things sounding just the way you like it, that sound should work through many different types of sound reinforcement. After all... the CD you play in your car should sound pretty much as good on your P.A., or through your computer monitors and so on.