In contrast, small speakers, especially non-round speakers with plastic diaphragms that are commonly found in laptops, have pretty wild response curves, something like this:
I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though. These microphone arrays are often designed to be very directional, some laptops have bottom-firing speakers, etc.
For most cheap computer speakers and headphones, you can make them sound better for music and gaming simply by boosting low and high frequencies. And for speech, you often want the opposite...
> I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though.
While any microphone might be able to provide some ballpark info which corrections to start with, laptop mics will be especially poor. Laptop manufacturers consider conferencing the primary use case for mics so they're intentionally placed and oriented to minimize hearing the laptop's speakers. More recent laptops feature far-field mic arrays which often apply DSP processing in hardware such as equalization, acoustic echo cancellation, spatial beamforming and dynamic multi-band compression with little or no control provided at the OS or app level.
If you care about audio it's worth picking a calibrated measurement microphone. It's one of those tools like a multimeter or colorimeter that are just good to have around. Even ~$100 buys a quite good reference mic you can use with REW to improve output from laptop and PC speakers but also home theater audio. If you have or can borrow one of the calibration mics bundled with Denon Audyssey-equipped AVRs, you can download a community-created REW profile for it. Since it's cheap and analog (3.5mm output), it's not as good as any real measurement mic but if you've got one already, it's better than nothing for measuring relative frequency response. However, if you also want to measure things like absolute dB you'll need to measure the input gain of your sound card's ADC with an SPL meter.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/uploads/articles/CCTB_PUIME...
In contrast, small speakers, especially non-round speakers with plastic diaphragms that are commonly found in laptops, have pretty wild response curves, something like this:
https://www.bestartech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/FRC-BL...
I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though. These microphone arrays are often designed to be very directional, some laptops have bottom-firing speakers, etc.
For most cheap computer speakers and headphones, you can make them sound better for music and gaming simply by boosting low and high frequencies. And for speech, you often want the opposite...