Do speakers choose your music preference

I would advise you to listen to some Tannoy speakers. They just play most music extremely well, jazz, rock, classical. Most models won't play in the low 20Hz range, but very few speakers do.

Subwoofers are your friends. 

Of all the speakers I have had, only one had the kind of bass performance that you could feel in your chest, the Tannoy R3s.

When I used to attend pub gigs my entire body was usually hit by a threatening impact of sound - some of it distortion due to the necessary but not ideal placement of the speakers.

I don't think I'd ever want to listen to pub rock at home - I didn't always like it back in the pub. I can imagine very few home systems satisfying fans of that live amplified sound. 

Quite amazing what a 100 watt Marshall amp can put out during 'High Heel Sneakers' or 'Stormy Monday'.

I think not only do speakers choose what sounds best on your system, but also your room does too!
How many folks are going to be able to play Stadium size rock concerts in their tiny den with little speakers employing 4" drivers and do that music any kind of justice? Same goes for large concert hall venues trying to be reproduced in a similar setting/speaker. OTOH, if you have a huge room with large floor standers that can drop down deep into the bass, then the ability to portray large scale will definitely be there--but maybe not intimate sounds? I think speaker manufacturers well know this...

Other  way around.

Remember hating JBL 100s (boom boxes) 40 years ago.  That was reflective of my tastes in music/speakers then and continues to now (not that I don’t listen to some rock and really like bass sometimes). 

Was about to write no, speakers haven't driven it. Yes Moabs make classical sound so doggone good you just can't get enough of it. But they do that for rock too. And jazz. So was going to say they don't drive it, not like I go out shopping for music just because I know it will sound fabulous on these speakers. 

But then, wait a minute. Didn't you just pay a small fortune for a White Hot Tchaikovsky and a One Step Patricia Barber? Not the kind of thing I would have done before with my other speakers. So yeah, maybe, a little.

My ears hear a proper speaker as  one that simply produces good music, like an amp.

Genre specifc gear? Purely subjective. 

I definitely think there is something to this.  In my experience you need a decent sized woofer to give the right punch and energy above the deepest bass.  A pair of bookshelf speakers with a sub can sound almost indistinguishable from large floorstanders on small scale, unamplified music or relatively clean sounding pop.  I've never found that configuration satisfying on orchestral music or full-bodied rock, though.  It can't pull off the dynamics. 

I also think there are some tradeoffs between the ability to play loudly and the ability to sound right at lower volume.  Of all of the speakers I've had I've never had a pair that I thought really excelled at both.  I'm guessing that in order to play really loudly without distortion drivers need to be built more heavily, with more mass, and that extra mass doesn't respond as well at low volume as lower mass drivers do.  Whatever the cause this has been a tradeoff I've noticed consistently.

There have been discussions on this forum that do indeed suggest that recordings of a full-scale symphony orchestra can be the hardest kind of recording to play back satisfactorily in a domestic setting.  If your speakers can't cope, you may well tend to favor small groups (quartets, etc.) or solo performances.  That stands to reason.  If you have a system that can do justice (or let's say, something close to justice) to a Mahler recording, then you're more likely to select that kind of music to play.

Yep. other than the excellent bass the R107/2 was hanging on to the classic Brit sound.

When I owned DeVore Gibbon 8 speakers, I found they were very unimpressive playing Rock, so for the 10 months I owned them I listened to Jazz only. That was their forte’.  It was a big mistake buying those speakers for the type of music I mostly listened to (Rock).  From then on in, I made sure the speakers I was looking at played the type of music I liked, well. To be honest, I bought them because the asking price was so low I just couldn’t pass them up.  Boy, was I sorry after I drove 800 miles (round trip)  to pick them up. 

In my case it was evidently true that my speakers were, for many years, heavily influencing my musical tastes.

How so?

Well, you see for much of the 90s my speakers were the diminutive Rega Kytes. These tiny triangularly ported boxes excelled at timing and impressions of speed, with a life-like tonal signature to boot.

For most pop music they were simply brilliant. 

However when a couple of friends began to organise listening sessions around each others homes, gradually my impression of Eden was disturbed.

Not only did we have vastly different tastes in music but we had vastly different speakers.

One of our group was into Both of the Cool Miles Davis and John Coltrane, neither of whom had particularly impressed me before.

On his bi-amped system driving a pair of large KEF floorstanders, wow, this music could kick! Suddenly you could really hear what the bass player was doing.
You could hear a real band.

Although I still preferred the Kytes, it became pretty obvious that I could never venture too far out from 60s/70s pop with them. 

Thus began a period of upgrading and a continuing search for some speakers that could do what the Kytes had done, but only bigger, deeper and wider.

My current speakers do all of those things with perhaps just a minimal loss of timing and coherence compared to the wonderful Kytes.

I can't speak for everyone but for me, both classical and jazz are more demanding of loudspeakers than most commercial pop.

With the former two, you need to get down to below 40Hz flat if you want to hear what every instrument is doing.

With the latter, there often isn't that much below 60Hz so it's not often an issue. 

Bandwidth isn't the only factor, but it's a fairly important one. It's certainly one that usually separates live and recorded sound.

Live sound is often felt as much as heard, and bookshelves can't really give you that.

No question.

Not even a question mark.

I disagree with your statement.