I’m digging this thread! I am a hobby musician and I use both types of speakers and I totally agree that monitors are for a specific listening purpose, while mixing and mastering a track. (Not to say I don’t pipe music and instruments through mine from time to time.) I have a pair of the Yamaha HS monitors and the reason I got them is to be able to tweak the EQ of each track so that it sounded good on the flat “bad” monitors first, knowing that when the same audio is played through speakers tuned for the listening experience they would sound even better!
As an example, if you tried to produce audio on a pair of “listening” speakers that had really good bass you wouldn’t feel like you’d need to raise the bass in the track EQ as much. When someone tries to listen to your audio through iPod headphones they might get almost no bass or impression of bass. Same thing goes for high pitched whines that tuned speakers might be filtering out. Play it on another system and you might hear a distracting whine during the whole song, but with the monitors you’d catch that right off the bat.
I have a cheaper turntable ($99) complete with Dieter Rams’ idea of the clear top covering.
I’m not a vinyl expert by any means so I wonder what kind features, materials, and designs would be in the $100 to $500 market. Maybe a dual needle arm on the top and bottom so you don’t have to flip the record! One cheap turntable x 2 = $200 the math checks out! 