You guys need to be careful with your second-hand advice. Some idiot is going to think that junky monitoring is better.
I'm just quoting words that I heard come out of Chris Lord Alge's mouth. And I can't imagine the maker of that crappy cassette deck is loading his pockets full of cash to say that---especially when he didn't even mention the brand or model of it.
But one thing I'll say is that you hear a lot of snobbish crap from some people that tends to frighten others from even trying to make/record any music. Things like:
"Oh, you have XXX monitors? Well ... good luck! You may as well be using a land line phone to monitor with. Call me when you get some real speakers."
"Oh, you're mixing in a bedroom? It's that small? To be honest, it really doesn't matter what you're using; it's going to sound like shit anyway."
Yet you have
Grammy-winning engineers saying things like, "In general, I do most of my mixing on a crappy little boom box," and for some reason that information is completely invalid.
I'm no mixing expert to be sure, but it seems to me---also backed up by what I've heard and read repeatedly---that when it comes to mixing, experience trumps gear (as it usually the case in my experience), meaning that the most important thing to do is to get familiar with the room, your speakers, etc. and learn how to mix on them. If you look at famous mixing rooms of the past, many of them hardly come close to the stereotypical minimum-requirement setup you often hear about here and on other forums.
I've seen the old Stax control room where all those hits were mixed (at the museum in Atlanta), and it was a tiny room (smaller than a typical bedroom) with no proper acoustic treatment whatsoever.
The mixing room at Abbey Road, where almost all the Beatles stuff was mixed, was
tiny as well with not much in the way of acoustic treatment, yet they managed to mix the hits of the most enduring band the world has ever seen.
My point is that there's an "if I only had this piece of gear" mentality to this site (and other places) lots of times, and that doesn't usually end up helping anyone.