The Quad 57 can’t be beat for some music---small Baroque ensembles (well-recorded harpsichords sound in-the-room), acoustic music like Bluegrass and Jazz trios and quartets. And vocals of course! People who say that some speakers are not better for some kinds of music than for other kinds---that a speaker good at one kind will be equally good at another---are imo mistaken. Different musics suffer more from certain kinds of speaker failings than does other music. Sure, a speaker should be designed to reproduce all musics equally well, but a speaker’s strengths and weaknesses will affect different musics differently, depending on the nature of the music and it’s demands on the speaker.
A speaker actually excelling in all areas of reproduction will be a very expensive one. For anyone buying on a restricted budget (who amongst us isn’t?), compromises and trade-offs must be expected and accepted, different speakers offering different strengths and weaknesses. As an extreme example, if a person listens only to solo piano, a speaker with even octave-to-octave tonal balance is a priority, other speaker abilities being less important to it’s reproduction. For a vocal music specialist, a speaker with low vowel-coloration will bring the most long-term musical satisfaction. For a Reggae music enthusiast, while those speaker abilities and attributes will benefit the music, they won’t to the same degree as will the speaker’s ability at rhythm and timing, which are absolutely essential to Reggae. If one’s speaker budget requires a choice between two speakers possessing different strengths and weaknesses, I sure would choose the speaker whose strengths are what my primary music requires and benefits most from, and whose weaknesses are what it suffers least from.