it tends to come down to the type of music one predominantly listens to —whether it’s pop, classical, jazz, rock, etc that person generally is more likely to favor a certain speaker type/crossover design over another.No, it doesn’t just tend to come down to that at all. The fact is that many well-designed speakers can play any genre of music really well. Then there’s the other side where people, like me, listen to almost every genre of music. With the plethora of excellent speakers out there, just knowing what type of music one listens to does very little to whittle down what speaker to buy. If you think you can make an excellent recommendation based on what music people listen to then you’re grossly underestimating many, many other extremely important variables and you’re just kidding yourself.
everyone has a flavor of speaker they worship and defend and profess to tell you why theirs is the best and yours simply is not — it’s the human condition on display.And that is precisely why you can’t recommend a speaker for someone based on what music they listen to. And this is why I recommended the Pearls to the OP — not because it’s MY preferred flavor but because it has the sound characteristics he said HE values and is looking for, which gives you a lot more to go on than just music genre in my book. Again, lots of speakers can play multiple genres of music very well so it’s not sufficient to make a meaningful recommendation. Sorry if this concept is just too complicated for you, but I certainly understand why it could be comforting for someone to think they can pick speakers simply by music genre when they’re not capable of dealing with more of the important decision metrics. Maybe simple just works at your level. Congrats.