Partially yes. The best headphones (arguably at this moment Beyerdynamic DT880) won’t come close to a well tuned room with high quality, flat-sounding monitors, but it’s second best. The headphones v. monitors debate comes to an end when you realize it is the person using them what makes the difference. I’m not talking about golden ears, but a person that has learned to use them well.

Add taste and personal touch to that formula, and yes, that looks like the near future of the industry. Landr, Ozone 8, the new Brainworx mastering box in the box, you name it. However, it seems to be the case that great mastering skills will become a bit of a luxury for truly commercial music with some industry budget or artists looking for that edge (Otherwise, 2-inch tape would have died already).

Sad but true. The other way around is impossible.

I guess it’s easy to see it in a parallel with images. Editing a high resultion tiff file in a 640x480 monitor with an 8-bit color graphics card will hinder you from seeing all the information contained in the source file. Whatever you edit won’t pay justice to the original file, and your edits will mostly be crappy. If you use a true-color card with a 4K monitor, you might identify flaws in the source file that you’ll miss otherwise. However, until you tune the editing room with a color-calibration device, the colors will still lie to you, and industry professionals won’t buy your artwork. It might please the audiences, but a company with proprietary colors will want that true-color render in all media where their art will be displayed. That’s what they pay for.

 

It's technically possible to mix on a bad system, provided you know very well its shortcomings in reference to flat system.
Still I would recommend getting at least flat-sounding headphones if you can't afford monitors or room treatment.

 

One thing i noticed with people who have bad gear is that they usually dont notice issues with sound frequencies mainly because they cant even hear them, but I think if you are experienced enough you can mix on anything. Mastering is a different issue though, you will need to reference your track on different systems to fully master your track.

 

Would think the more accurate the source the better, but if you are looking to have it sound as good as it can on many systems then listening (not working with) as many sources as you can may be of some benefit, a popular thing I read people do is listen in their car, I like to use this as a secondary indication, only because i listen to a lot of music in my car so it gives my ears(brain) a good reference in relation to others music I like . Im not looking to please everyone so I tend to stick to accurate sources.

 

I can't get past the word "heardable"!!

 

Unfortunately, most of us who start on "bad gear" do not have another reference as to what "good gear" sounds like. It's like being short sighted believing the world is like that until they get glasses. People who get good mixes on bad gear are those who have a clear reference in their minds to make a contrast against.

That's kind of nasty. we are so many non-native speakers of English around here.

 

Thank you. I find that a staggering amount of people ignore my exemplary use of punctuation.
(Seriously? A lot of people put the comma outside of the quotation marks, including one of my College English teachers, which is incorrect.)

I find that of all the different systems that I test my mixes on, the car is the most difficult to dial in properly. I recommend getting a mix straight on every other possible device as opposed to trying to get it to sound good in a car first; I learned that the hard way.

Good call on that one.
(On the other hand, some of the most egregious misuses of the English language comes from native speakers. )