so many speakers

My take is that there are so many speakers because there are so many different sizes and shapes of rooms and so many different listening tastes.

So yes, there are some speakers that work better with specific types of music, but moreso there are speakers that work better with different room sizes and configurations, the room actually being an extension of the speaker as far as low frequencies are concerned, and there are speakers that work better with different amplifier configurations.

This brings to mind my personal philosophy (which will no doubt irk the "source first" gang) is that job one is to find a decent sounding room and place a nice set of speakers in there that work really well in the space and optimally placed acoustically within said space-add room treatments as needed. Next, find an amp that really likes driving these speakers. If you got that, you're 90% home and well prepared to hear the differences upstream with any gear selection you should choose. If you don't, prepare to join the brigade of gear swapping zombies that is AudioGon.

There might be speakers made to a specific type of music but I wouldn't have any speaker made that way. Ever.

Take a long, hard look at all the different types of speakers and see how they portray the human voice, and then acoustic instruments. If they can do that in a convincing manner, then they should be able to handle almost any kind of music genre you can think of, clipping aside (that's where the amp comes into play).

From my experience, I prefer widebanders with some kind of tweeter augmentation. The payoff is coherence, imaging, timing (some of your English types refer to it as PRaT) and a wonderful sense of involvement.

Any decent amp can play the middle man so make sure your source is up to par with what you want to hear and how you want to hear it. Remember the old adage: garbage in, garbage out.

That's my take on the whole affair and it's what I've settled for. Good luck in what you chose and don't be a big hurry to upgrade.

All the best,
Nonoise

For a moment I thought you asked WHY are there so many speakers on the market. That would have been one of the best questions ever, and I was prepared to bet all my Tiny Tim LPs that no one would get the right answer. Close but no cigar!
Cheers