The loud home hi-fi system has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Adults will sit and watch a sophisticated program for an hour. I’m not sure a significant % will ever go back to doing that with music. Seems to me now, most adults look at music as something they listen to while they are also doing something else, driving, jogging, making supper. It’s just background noise, acceptable to be experienced through computer speakers while surfing the internet or earbuds or whatever you call them. So they produce and mix the songs with that in mind, a lot of it is made to have all the levels as high as possible. It’s why they sound really bad on good systems, in my opinion.
Freegards
There is more HiFi in even a home studio than you think... Not more than mine. Start talking professional studios that use Genelec for tracking monitors then move to a full tuned system in an acoustically treated room, just to mix. Mastering? To the nth degree. With some graybeard who lives in a quiet room just to keep his ears good.
Kinda off base about quality control. Otherwise songwriter albums wouldn’t cost $10K or more just in studio expenses.
That’s the problem with audiophiles, their ears are better than everyone else’s, LOL
No one ever recorded music with audiophiles in mind because the market isn’t big enough to justify 92k HD audio. The only gains are in the ambience anyway. Enter Lexicon, exit audio snobs... I’d challenge you to tell me the difference between a Slingerland and a Fibes regardless of the cost of your vacuum tubes or not.