There are so many other reasons besides self-noise that would impair an analog FM signal for an audiophile's ears, starting with the 75-microsecond preemphasis.
Anyone that concerned about audio quality on a "local live concert" (and who broadcasts those anymore?) would do well to just get an HD tuner and enjoy the lack of pre-emphasis, wider dynamic range, additional stereo separation, and so on. Probably won't need that "rooftop antenna" for a clean signal lock, either.
The price you may pay comes in the form of digital artifacts, especially if a station is running multiple HD channels.
A theory I have (and it is mine) is that people vary considerably in their sensitivity to digital artifacts. I can tolerate quite a bit of compression and start hearing it only at a 128 kbps mp3/64 kbps aac bitrate rate. Others are far more sensitive, like my husband. I think part of that is that he has perfect pitch (and I don't). He pretty much can't stand digital anything other than uncompressed formats. He is also a big-time classical listener, though I had to call his attention to KVOD - which, by the way, is digital only on KCFR-HD2 and not on its main analog signal.
While none of this has anything to do with "self noise", it does speak to the acceptability of compressed digital formats for at least some people.
HD does a great job of solving multipath issues, no doubt about it. But there's a trade-off: noise for analog, toilet-swirl sounds for digital...for some people, at least.
My personal opinion, based on A/B comparisons with a high-quality tuner from 1990, an NAD 4300, which has been re-capped, and the Sangean HDT-1X tuner is that the 4300 has a punchier sound with better stereo separation than the HD reception on the Sangean. There may be more noise on the NAD but there are no digital artifacts that are added as a result of HD encoding and decoding. Certainly there could be multiple factors, including the individual components used in each tuner. But there are times when I go, "eh, whatever".
The main issue I have with HD carriers is that they tend to "fool" the automatic tuning systems of recent DSP-based radios made in China into thinking that there's a station on a frequency adjacent to the frequency that a station actually is on. Tecsun radios tend to have this problem quite a bit.
As for "self noise" - yeah, I've never heard it myself. There were discussions about it several years ago on the FMTuners mailing list but I haven't seen any recently.
When I get a little more information, and have a little more time when I'm not traveling so much, I'm planning to post something to the DX and Reception forum about my experiences with FM reception in a relatively flat area of Denver. The results have been somewhat surprising, with simple, stupid stuff sometimes getting better, cleaner reception than fancier antennas. Good FM reception is still an art, I'm concluding.