Fishybob, what are the measurements of your room, how do you have your monitors set up in the space, and what monitors are you using? Translation is one of the arts of mixing. It is a part of the craft that really takes experience, experimentation, and also the proper tools for the job.
I find one of the most useful tests of a mix is the "walk in the hallway" test (or the "go into the next room" test). I'll put the mix up and then go out of the room and stand in the hallway. Things sound a lot different there, and I certainly hear problems with bass buildup and some balance issues.
I personally really hate printing mixes, burning CD's and then taking them around to different playback settings, although I do that of course. It's just that it's so time-consuming when you do it multiple times. So I've been working on getting translations better without having to do so much of that.
I've mentioned this in another post recently, but my basic tools are these:
1. a big and a small set of monitors with a switch box
2. listening at extremely low levels to check for relative balances between parts
3. checking very loud from time to time
4. headphone checks
5. checking/mixing in MONO
6. listening further back in the room
7. listening in the hallway outside the room or in the next room
The reason for these techniques is to avoid the surprises of having the mix sound good in the room but translate poorly. Basically, if you can average out the mix so it sounds good in all the above scenarios it will probably translate a lot better when you take the CD of the mix to consumer systems for playback.
The honkiness in the mid-range might be revealed by switching between two sets of monitors, for example. My two sets are the Mackie HR824's and the KRK V4's. One set of big nearfields and one set of small nearfields. It's important that the small set have cones no bigger than 4" in my opinion, because that is the same size as boom boxes.
The other issue is that probably you have a lot of musical information going on in the mid frequency ranges. It's very easy to eq each instrument separately so that they sound good and then put it all together. However, it is often the case that if everything is eq'ed properly to fit together in the mix it will NOT sound good by itself. So I'd say spend more time eq'ing with all the instruments playing at once, or in groupings, rather than eq them in isolation.
The real issue though is why wasn't the honkiness revealed while you were working on it? That can also be an element of ear fatigue, or something similar to fatigue that you don't hear about too much. I guess you'd call it "ear getting used to it" syndrome.
After working with sounds for a while your ear gets accustomed to it and accepts the tone. This is part of the reason why I find it *much* harder to mix my own music than the music of others. The loss of objectivity leads to surprises later when playing back on other systems.
This is why I like multiple speaker sets, mixing at different levels, going out of the room, etc.: you keep presenting your ear with fresh sounds to hear, or at least fresh ways to hear the same thing. If you sit in the same position all the time, listening in stereo at the same levels with little variation, your ear will absolutely become accustomed to whatever you are presenting it with. Then when taken to other envirnoments you hear it differently for the first time and there are surprises.
I know that a lot of this is general advice not directly related to how to eq honkiness, but I think there may be some root causes here as to why your mixes aren't translating. Hope some of this is helpful.