Colored speakers will color anything you play through them.

Possibly that means that some genres or particular albums could sound better, but the flipside of that is that others will sound worse.

That's not what I want, since you never know how a particular album might be mixed. I want to have the widest range of "sounding good".

Maybe if I wanted to have multiple speaker setups in the living room for different genres, but otherwise...

If you're not aiming for accuracy, then what are you aiming for?

One way to think of monitors is that they don't bias or color the sound. That's technically true, I suppose.

But another way to think of monitors is that they're designed to be the superset of all possible listening experiences. If there is any flaw in your sound that could show up on some set of speakers, you should be able to perceive that flaw on your monitors too, so that you can fix it.

Of course, if a mix sounds good on some particular sound system, it's nice if they sound good on the monitors too. But that's less of the point. Monitors are intended to provide actionable feedback for audio production decisions. They're trying to shine a bright light on every dark corner of your mix so that nothing is hidden from you that might show up for a listener.

From that perspective, monitors are sort of the worst speakers for casual listening: They're designed to emphasize as many production flaws as possible.

It's also important to think about how the music you're listening to was mixed and mastered. The people who made production choices for the music you listen to are targeting a range of listeners with mostly average speaker setups. If your speakers are consumer-oriented and middle of the road, then they're more likely to be in the sweet spot for how the album was mixed.

For example, if the mix engineer knows that most speakers overly boost the lows to make things more hyped, they might tame those lows in the mix to get a more balanced result. Now if you listen to that mix on "unbiased" monitors, the lows will be weak.

It's sort of a Keyne's beauty contest: speaker purchasers are trying to pick speakers that make recordings sound good, while engineers are trying to make recordings sound good on the speakers they picked. There isn't really a fixed ground truth. An accurate reproduction of a record deliberately engineered for biased speakers won't necessarily sound good.

That's one way to think of it.

I like to think of it as "revealing every production detail". I want to hear the skill of both the musician and the production.

I'm personally very heavily biased toward well-produced music though.

The alternative is masking details, which is not what I want.

I could get that with cheap speakers in a crappy room, or in the car with the engine running.

Great mixing with a great performance on revealing speakers is an amazing experience.

>they might tame those lows in the mix to get a more balanced result

So you buy speakers with extra lows, and then when you change music to something mixed with neutral bass, it's overpowering?

I'd rather have neutral, calibrated speakers and have most music be balanced and then I can EQ the badly mixed music if I want.

It's a moving target, but I'd much rather have a zeroed rifle. Yes I know the analogy falls apart when the target changes distance but it's the first thing I thought of.