That’s funny; I’m always debating my brother, talking about how earbuds sound much better than even high-end monitors, largely because of the surrounding environment (or lack thereof, when earbuds are in).

When I make music I have to do the opposite; take my earbuds out and listen to the music over my car stereo or via my MacBook Pro speakers, to make sure it doesn’t sound good only through earbuds.

Unfortunately this isn't the perfect solution as there is no universal device or average user. Especially with music, mixing songs for earbud/headphones will produce a worse quality song for another pair. In the same way we've seen software written by users primarily using x86 work less effectively when compiled to arm. Plenty of open source projects are developed on by people with less than adequate hardware yet they're still bloated and slow.

I think it's very sensible (if a little unrealistic) to test applications on as many pieces of intended hardware as possible, and this somewhat reminds me about this story of snow clearance[0], where the solution was not only the intrudction of a new perspective but also empirical measurements.

[0]: http://info.gritit.com/blog/what-is-gender-balanced-snow-cle...

I think testing with multiple hardware is a good idea. For audio, I'd say that editing audio on low grade audio equipment might backfire. I've always heard that professionals listen through multiple sources to make sure it sounds good on everything but idk how true that is these days.

I've listened to quite a few people on YouTube and some musicians who clearly did their editing with a certain pair of headphones/earbuds. It comes through immediately on my speakers because high pitched whining noises made it through the edit (making it nearly unbearable to listen to) and/or they boosted the bass to infinity. (Usually indicates they never listened to their project on speakers because the bass heavy music between cuts becomes disgustingly loud whereas on headphones it's not that bad)

It makes listening to their content impossible on decent speakers but fine on okay headphones.