It's a question that to every serious recording musician, just has to ask itself at some point - 'Really, can it be as bad as all that using a quality home audio speaker for your sole near field monitors?'.
The usual reply to that has always been incredulity - as if to say, 'How could you even say that?'.
As you might guess, that sort of inflexibility isn't really called for unless your aspirations for your music are ambitious ones.
What exactly is the problem with the home audio speaker? Why should a home audio speaker compromise your ambitions? Take Bose's venerable Acoustimass speaker system.
It puts out bone jarring bass, and everyone loves it.
Always has for decades.
What could possibly be wrong but it? The thing is, playing with home speakers, you deal with loaded dice.
They are loaded in favor of your ears.
No matter what you put on there, home audio speakers are meant to make music sound deliciously thumpy and pretty, while masking any problems.
Whoa, you're saying - can speakers really do that much to music? They certainly can.
What you are looking for in studio monitors is a pair of near-perfect sound mirrors.
If you wanted a mirror that would show you exactly what you look like, pimples, imperfections, the real deal, you wouldn't choose a tinted mirror and low lighting, now would you? You would want the kind of setup they have at a professional salon - blazing bright lights, a squeaky clean mirror, and certainly no soft focus effects and airbrushing (not that a mirror can do soft focus or airbrushing, but the mirror analogy had to be dropped at some point).
A home audio speaker is meant to be the airbrushing soft-focus equivalent of what inhabits a Photoshopper's bag of tricks.
The way these speaker puts out music, they pump up the bass up too high in a way that muddies things and makes the sound artistically unclear - the audio equivalent of airbrushing.
Once that happens, and other frequencies are cut and mangled to suit a static image of what pleases the ears, you get audio that is extremely perfect in one way, but that is quite a work of fiction in every other.
There is one other drawback to using the home audio speaker in the studio - the illusion promptly drops away when you switch to a different pair of home audio speakers that are built to promote somewhat different version of that illusion, or if you switch to a pair of really high end speakers that are meant to show things as they are.
In short, the home audio speaker is an undependable ally to base your musical aspirations on.
They may be okay for a demo recording.
But for anything that's supposed to be unleashed on the unsuspecting public, even a low end pair of $600 Genelecs would do a lot better.