which excels at Rock and Roll

I remember in the early-70’s the JBL L100 being sold as a "Rock ’n’ Roll" speaker.

@bdp24 I remember that and its the classic example of this myth. IMO it wasn't all that good at rock- it did all genres equally poorly. One of my employees restored a pair so we got to audition them extensively. I don't know anything about the reissue. 

 I totally agree Ralph. The original L100 (I haven’t heard the reissue) was actually "disgusting" sounding, not just wildly inaccurate and extremely colored, but also very amusical. Maybe the worst sounding loudspeaker I’ve ever heard (though there is also the Bose 901 ).

I remember in the early-70’s the JBL L100 being sold as a "Rock ’n’ Roll" speaker.

I also remember that! JBL L100 being sold as a "Rock'' speaker is salesman BS.

JBL L100 brochure see here. No mention of it being engineered or designed as a ''Rock'' speaker. 

Mike

To start with, comparing home audio speakers to those at a live rock concert is silly. Being calibrated to send sound to cover an entire open air stadium will mean they can only lack nuance, for all their might and power - this is a matter of physics, not opinion.

There are those who will say that a domestic speaker that plays the genre of rock better than others, plays to the strength of rock, which is loud, raw, and less discerning of the subtlety found in, say, classical recordings. It is likely this opinion comes from those who have never heard rock from a speaker which hits with depth, raw dynamics….and absolute nuance. There is as much nuance in the rudest rock as there is in any other genre or music, in the same way there is as much slam in Ravel or Stravinsky as there is in the grungiest of rock.

It is for this reason that I believe Ralph is absolutely correct, that pound for pound, speakers are agnostic, and a well-engineered speaker which addresses the common disadvantages of its typology, will play with every ounce of slam and subtle touch of the same recording, as much as a badly designed speaker will make any music sound awful.

Lesser speakers, all of which predominate the entire spectrum of speakers made, will favour their strengths. Good speakers get as close to agnostic as one will find. Most speakers, even by the most heralded manufacturers in the world, are compromised, lesser speakers. They give one the sound of hifi, while failing to bring high fidelity to sound.

The limited sample size refers to one’s access to have critically listened to the various and highest states of development for each typology of speaker made, not merely the range of music played. And without the benefit of that, we cannot wax on about the tiny sample size of what we have heard. It’s true what is said about not knowing what we do not know.

I suspect Ralph was being polite and kind.

In friendship - kevin

Actually, there IS one speaker which can be related to Rock music more than perhaps any other: the Yamaha NS-10. The NS-10 was for years found if just about every recording studio control room I was in, used to monitor the sound the recording engineer was getting from the mics out in the studio. The tweeter in the NS-10 was so nasty engineers began placing a sheet of toilet parer over that driver.

Way back in the 1960’s J. Gordon Holt pointed out in his reviews of both loudspeakers and recordings that the sound he heard in many Pop music recordings (as opposed to Classical, not Rock) was an inverse of the frequency response he measured in many speakers that were being used as monitors in studios. Get it? The engineers were using graphic equalizers to make the instruments and voices sound lifelike, but they were using monitor loudspeakers with very inaccurate frequency responses. If you looked at the frequency respose suggested by the sliders in the equalizers, it was the inverse of the frequency response of the monitor loudspeakers! +1 plus -1 = 0.