Confusing Mix Translation Issue - Help appreciated

Hi. If anyone here can offer some insight on this issue I would be very grateful.

I made a tune. Mixed and mastered it myself. It's electronic music, broadly speaking you could call it house.

Throughout the mix and master I consistently referenced 2 other tracks of a similar style that are mixed and mastered really well.

My final master ended up sounding quite good. When I listen using my HD 600 headphones and my Adam F5 monitors, my track sounds quite close to my reference tracks. No massive EQ differences can be heard.

Here's the problem. When I listen using cheap commercial Sony earbuds (the type the average person uses to listen to music), there's an uncomfortable harsh high end audible. Since my track and my reference tracks sound very similar in the HD 600s, you would think that if the cheap Sony earbuds add a harsh high end to my tune then they would also add a similar thing to my reference tracks, right? In other words if the mixes are matched in the HD 600s, then they should also be more or less matched in any other headphone. However, the reference tracks don't sound harsh. The high end sounds bright in a nice, smooth way.

This is really confusing to me. The HD 600 headphones are recommended for mixing purposes because they are quite flat and true-sounding. I sonically emulated my reference tracks very closely using those headphones. Since those reference tracks are of a very high standard and are mixed to sound great across all listening systems, I thought that by doing this I would achieve the same. But now there's this surprise harshness that appears in my track when I listen with the cheap commercial earbuds that doesn't appear in the reference tracks.

I must be missing something here.

Anyone able to explain this? Help is much appreciated.

Your ears aren't perfect. Perhaps A/B monitoring with scoping tool (i.e. analyzer in EQ) could help spotting the offending harshness.

Try to spot where and when the harshness occurs.

For instance, when you listen your mix in Logic with the cheap earbuds, do your hear the harshness, or does it appear only after it is bounced. In latter case, are you listening from iTunes?

My siggestion here is for you to find out when and where the harshness appear... so you could intervene at the source of your issue.

Mixing with headphones is hard, let alone mastering and effectively wrapping everything up.

At this point i'd suggest LANDR, and book a proper studio for yourself for an hour or two to check what you've been doing.