if one if serious about hifi, music preference is irrelevant. A proper system can fulfill full spectrum expectations. You might decide some deficiencies are more tolerable than others, but the aim is everything is musically convincing. -Phil
This view I think makes sense for your reproduction philosophy which, if I understand you correctly, focuses on coherence and not on height and scale. But I disagree. My ears don't hear it working this way in real life -- comparing what I hear in live music to what I hear from different stereo loudspeaker systems.
I don't hear a full classical symphony orchestra playing Pictures at an Exhibition coming out of a Zu Definition IV as convincingly as I hear it coming out of a YG XV or a Rockport Arrakis. I would like to hear the upcoming Zu Dominance.
I believe strongly that musical genre preference substantially drives loudspeaker preference. If we narrow the musical genre preference to jazz I actually think that a lot of individual subjective preferences would coalesce around a plurality view that horns/SET is the most convincing way to reproduce jazz music.
I personally believe that there is something about the way horn loudspeakers reproduce the sounds of brass instruments which is consonant with the way brass instruments themselves produce their sounds. If people who have experience listening to a lot of different types of loudspeakers hear jazz reproduced by horns/SET I think there would be statistically significant agreement.
If someone’s musical genre preference were mainly rock, or if someone’s musical genre preferences were equally divided among the main genres of music, I would not select for that person a horn/SET system.
For rock and thunderous symphonic classical music I like to have a lot of cone driver surface to move air. I think a large-sized or maybe a medium-sized dynamic driver system is a general purpose or all purpose loudspeaker system.
Conversely a large, four column dynamic driver system might not reproduce small-scale music -- solo vocalists with acoustic accompaniment or solo instrument musicians or small ensembles -- as convincingly as a smaller loudspeaker system might.
I think electrostatic and ribbon drivers reproduce particularly convincingly the sound of the human voice. Consequently I personally like best electrostatic and ribbon driver planar speakers. (I also like their "open" sound.)