In the early 1990s when I was most engaged in the creation of rock music, the general goal was to make it so the music was enjoyable and all the parts were audible on just about every type of audio gear on which the target audience would be listening. That meant making cassettes to check on a Walkman with those little earphones or a car cassette deck. It included listening on the break room boombox and on off the shelf PA speakers commonly used by DJs (often Yamaha, which were quite popular at that time for their price/performance). There were even some studios and mixing suites which has off the shelf FM and AM radio processing applied to their signals prior to going to the transmitter (compression, EQ, harmonic enhancement, etc.). Often recording, mixing, and post-processing decisions were made which would ensure all the parts in an arrangement were pretty much audible or clearly contributing to the sound which would take away from the extreme fidelity which could have been be achieved if the target audience was thought to own high end audio systems. I remember being totally shocked by the amount of compression and limiting which would be applied to individual instruments or entire tracks. I was also often shocked to see instruments like bass guitars, bass drums, and other obviously bass energy instruments being EQ'ed to resemble a bass instrument without any significant energy below 85Hz because most headphones and dorm-room class speakers lacked deep bass (this was in the era before subwoofers were common at home and car subs often did little below 60Hz). Think about the extreme move Lars Ulrich went to in order to make bass drums audible in the mix while not actually containing any bass at all - they sound like he is hitting a cardboard box with a mallet rather than pounding a huge bass drum as was heard in the studio.
You can listen to the huge rock and roll hit-makers of the time like Tom Petty, Nirvana, INXS, and others and quickly realize that while you may love the music itself, the recordings sound pretty much the same on your carefully designed and implemented $20,000 home stereo as they do in a 1995 Mustang or Bose Acoustic Wave radio. Often one of the goals was to get the relatively same experience no matter how good or shitty your system is, even if it comparably limits the potential for the music on a top end audiophile system. Not everyone was comfortable making decisions like Peter Gabriel, Crowded House, or others who could make an album which can be huge hits on FM radio and MTV while also blowing away audiophiles on their high end home systems.
While I wish things were different in those days, from a business perspective you cannot argue against the success of those recordings and the resulting fame of the artists who made millions on tours, licensing, and other outlets for the music which became the soundtrack of millions of people's lives.
