The WORST Components for Rock and Pop Music

Plus you have to factor in the fact that some rock recordings are poorly engineered (overcompressed, etc.)

I run Martin Logan Prodigy Speakers,have for years with excellent results and I basically only listen to hard rock.
I will say the system is far from sounding polite??
It all depends on they way you set it up just like it does with any other speaker or components,its all setup.

I would like to 2nd the opinion of Sogood51- i wanted something to play rock/pop music for my bedroom, and ended up with a JVC "Kaboom" box which sounded amazing in the store. when i fired it up at home with some jimi hendrix set to a volume i rarely listen to, i felt i had re-captured that REALLY ROCK-HEAVY dense sound i hadn't heard in years. in addition, the side firing speakers produced the kind of stereo field that hendrix and others were exploiting in those days (ping-ponging). they still make these boxes, and they do not distort until pushed almost all the way. i prefer not to play Mozart on the JVC, but it's really sad the last time i played Crosby, Stills, and Nash on my "accurate" system, where all of the sloppy mixing and timing errors drew my attention away from the timelessly great performances.
i can understand that these guys just wanted to record those great songs they had composed perhaps with a minimum of fuss, but those alblums are now classics; yet, their production standards are pretty low compared, for example, to recent madonna cd's...

Really, none of the modern, sleek loudspeakers with one or two 6.5 woofers are good for rock, they just lack the push for rock.

Sean,
Sounds like you have some electrostatics there!
As for the AR's, I had forgotten about the real big ones, esp. with the dual side firing 10's or 12's, yeah they probably really rock given enough juice. I'm thinking more in line with the 3's, 4's or 2's, the classic "new england" sound of 3 decades ago that AR is famous for, vs. say, Altec Lansing.