It's pretty funny when you look back at the different mediums that our business has gone through in order to judge the accuracy of the music you deliver to the public.
As we worked in the studio, probably the most important element of any mix or production was the ability to take a reference copy of it home to play on the system we knew intimately well and determine which changes had to be made to it the next day to finish the mix and ensure that it lived up to our expectations for it.
Finding the right medium to check the accuracy of our work was a very long unreliable path taking us through many trial and error moments to reach the point where we could feel confident about what we did being accurate and no where near the we technology of sound is today!
In an imperfect early world one of the best ways we had available to us in the studio to judge the accuracy of our mixes was to take high quality cassettes record them on the same make machines that we had at home and see if what we heard in the studio translated to the environment that we knew extremely well in our homes.
I must say, that while it was not a perfect medium showing variances in fluctuations of speed and sometimes the reproduction of the top and bottom end, but it was the best means we had at the time and I frequently used them to judge my mixing and mastering of the work I did!
Here from my archives is a cassette of one of those mixes that I did where I believed what I'd created was exactly what I had intended and I believe that history proves that was the case indeed, as the song by Huey Lewis and the News, "I Want A New Drug" skyrocketed to Number One on the charts!
My point to you here is that you are not judged or held hostage to the medium you use to critically listen to your music on, but rather the effort you put into ensuring that what you hear will indeed translate to the general public upon its release.
You must hold yourself accountable for all you do in this business!!