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Some mastering engineer in another post said "they mix it, we fix it", when in fact i think most of the time it is "we mix it, they give us back a brick"...
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As part of my research, I had a tune I recorded mastered by several different engineers. I basically let the engineers do whatever the heck they wanted to it. The results varied slightly in style but they were all totally listenable and all of them sat around -10dBfs RMS which is about where I put it on my own version of the master.
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The problem with "learning speakers" is that you can't fix anything you can't hear because the speaker couldn't reproduce it. Learning speakers is real important for mixing but mastering is largely about catching problems any mixer most certainly would have fixed had they been audible.
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I just had to make that point with somebody yesterday. He wants to be a one man shop, shooting/editing video and being able to do the sound himself. He's using cheap PC stere speakers and headphones to do his mixes. I planted the idea to at least mix to stems and let me handle the rest. His reply was "Well, the thing is, I really want to learn this stuff and get used to using the tools that I've purchased."
My reply was "
I can understand that, but you wouldn't want to edit and color correct a movie on a 3" B&W Fred Meyer TV. Likewise, you don't want to mix audio you can't hear properly." That got him to agree to letting me master from 3 stereo stems.