Listen on whatever you like! I feel it's the mix/master engineers' jobs to create a final-product recording that sounds good in as many different environments a

Listen on whatever you like! I feel it's the mix/master engineers' jobs to create a final-product recording that sounds good in as many different environments as possible. Just my opinion, of course, and there are certainly recordings that will only sound good on fine hi-fi gear. I like to think of a recording as a miniature of a real-world musical experience. I love cranking up my old Mesa Mark I guitar amp to the threshold of pain and wailing on it. It's an amazing sonic experience. But I cannot reproduce that sound on a pair of $20 Skullcandy earbuds. So instead of going for accuracy of reproduction, I'm trying to reproduce the feel, the vibe. Kind of like how a painting represents a landscape differently than a photograph, and neither really represents the landscape well. I'll take the painting, when it's truer to the feeling of the landscape. This can be seen in dynamic range. Human hearing has tremendous dynamic range, and live acoustic instruments do as well. But your average modern record has no more than 20db, probably far less (often less than 6db). The "loudness war" of RMS vs peak volume is at play here, but more importantly, it plays to the dynamic weakness of consumer audio gear. Less dynamic range sounds "better", up to a point. You don't want to listen to un-mastered mixes. You really don't.