This goes absolutely against the real-world experience of professional mixing and mastering engineers, people who make their livings on "accurate" reproduction

This goes absolutely against the real-world experience of professional mixing and mastering engineers, people who make their livings on "accurate" reproduction of music. Speakers are not accurate, period. Anyone who has been both a musician and a mixing engineer (like me) will tell you this. The idea of "accurate" response from audio systems is magical thinking. The mixing and mastering engineers aren't trying to make some perfect reproduction of natural sound. They're trying to make records that sound as good as possible on as many different kinds of reproduction systems as possible - not just "perfect" audiophile systems, but car speakers, iPods, etc. As such, rather than going for accurate speakers, mix engineers rely on speakers that they know very well, so they can predict results elsewhere more easily. The most popular professional mixing speaker is the Yamaha NS-10. It's not "accurate". It doesn't even pretend to be accurate. In fact, it has a pronounced peak and significant harshness around 2khz, right in the most sensitive area for vocals and midrange melodic instruments. Why use it? Because if you can make it sound good on the NS-10, it'll sound good anywhere. Likewise, the second most popular speaker is the Auratone, a single driver with limited frequency range. The Auratone has two advantages. First, it reflects the limited construction of many real-world speakers. Second, because it lacks a crossover, there's no phase weirdness in the midrange, so it's actually very pure at the most musically critical points. Deep bass and sizzly highs aren't important. Midrange is important, and Auratones are brutally honest at that, more than speakers costing orders of magnitude more.