Total audio noob here: are you talking about hardware or software DSP? If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC, how would I go about "tuning" the speakers?
are you talking about hardware or software DSP?
If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC
1. You need a calibrated microphone like the uMik from MiniDSP or one from Dayton Audio. That's about $100, though, so that sort of kills the value equation in a lot of situations.[1]
2. You then measure the speaker's output with something such as a free tool called Room EQ Wizard: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
3. REQ can then output the necessary DSP configuration files, that can be then be used by a MiniDSP, EqualizerAPO, etc. Or it can just tell you the necessary corrections that can then be manually typed into anything that supports parametric EQ settings.
Here's a video fully demonstrating all of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1aYsjPc2m4&t=2s
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[1] There are community efforts to take these kinds of measurements and open source them so everybody can benefit. The largest I'm aware of is these open-sourced headphone measurements (which require a different sort of measurement rig) and corrections: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
For speakers, there are the measurements and EQ corrections published by places like AudioScienceReview.com and NoAudiophile.com
If you do software EQ and use other peoples' measurements you can do this for $0, without the grunt work of measurements.
> You need a calibrated microphone
Ah, of course, it's a chicken and egg problem... :)
edit: typos
His corrections for cheap Micca speakers were my gateway into hi-fi. For under $100 I had true hi-fi sound at my desk. However, he's not active any more, and most of the speakers he's measured are no longer available.
Blatant plug: https://github.com/erdewit/HiFiScan