Sidebar:

Who are these end-users, and how are they listening to me?

There are the six basic listening environments that consumers are using these days that you should probably be concerned about when you are producing music recordings:

1. The hi-fi in the living room, as we're discussing here. Stereo speakers with listening from a sofa on the median plane. I'm including audiophile systems in this category.
2. The mono TV and table radio. A cheap, single-speaker system set anyplace convenient. Popular in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, etc.
3. The Walkman with headphones. Isolated, broad-bandwidth stereophonic listening in-your-head.
4. The car. Multi-speaker stereo (these days four speakers seem to be the minimum) in a very noisy environment (70 dBA SPL @ 55 mph is typical performance) with no median plane possible, except under bizarre circumstances.
5. The boom-box. A narrow, in-your-face portable stereo system with limited bandwidth and power. Stereo TV is a video version of this.
6. The boom-van. A vehicle with a high-power multi-speaker stereo system, including subwoofers, designed to be loud enough to mask the sound of the urban automotive environment.

Also, coming soon to a home near you: home theater with surround sound! Uh oh! This means trouble!

Now if you think about these environments, its got to be obvious that there is no reasonable way to create music recordings that are going to be ideal for all of them at once. The table radio, the car and the Walkman represent listening situations that are mutually incompatible: recordings optimized for the mono table radio must sacrifice the stuff that makes headphones sound terrific, while really cool low-level sonic detail and big dynamic range for headphones is going to be inaudible in a car. And so on and so forth, not to mention home theater! continued...
Dave Moulton is trying to get sound. Alex Case is trying to get ahead and Peter Alhadeff is trying to get his guitar to work right.