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.
