Yes, it makes a big difference to my eyes. It’s a difference between having a tint or just being… white.
I have two 219A lights, two 219B lights, and two wide-spectrum lights. Plus a variety of single Cree tints. Oh, and a D25A 219, but that one doesn’t count since EagleTac kinda botched it.
Every high-CRI or wide-spectrum light I have looks quite noticeably better to me than all of the single-Cree-tint lights. Some of the neutral-white Crees with a pinkish hue look pretty good to me, but they’re still a step below the first six lights I mentioned.
The 219Bs do look different than the 219As though. They seem to be about 5000K instead of 4500K, even though they’re both spec’d at 4500K. But both are very nice, and very white when no other lights are on.
About the wide-spectrum lights… on one I kind of missed where I was aiming and it ended up a little warmer than intended (very slightly yellow), but the other one was spot-on and it renders colors more vividly than the sun. But despite having such vivid color rendering, when I compare beamshot pictures of a colorful subject to a 65-CRI cool white Cree XM-L 1A, the pictures look almost the same.
However, if you don’t care much about vivid colors, you’re probably better off with a regular Cree emitter. It’s brighter and more efficient and the XM-L2 / XP-G2 product lines handle heat better.
The easiest way I’m aware of to try a high-CRI light is to grab a L3 Illumination L10-219. It’s the least-expensive high-CRI light on the market. Shipping from the US can be pretty expensive though, so you could also just build a light like what I did in this thread. It may be difficult to find a verified-good source of the correct bin of Nichia 219 emitters though.