I had Quad 57's for a long time before I (foolishly) started chasing something different with cone speakers. The Quads always gave a decisive read on the quality of recordings; some things in my collection were stunning and others were practically unlistenable. But when new speakers came into the house, I suddenly found that some of those recordings were no longer in the camp I had always believed them to be in.
An example was Rickie Lee Jone's Traffic From Paradise. On my Quads, I thought this recording was amazeballs, as the kids would say. But then with the Avalons and some other subsequent acquisitions, my enthusiasm for the recording diminished. How does one make sense of this?