how do I "tune" my makeshift monitors for my room?

Yeah... i'm cheap... Can't afford nearfield studio monitors right now. In Sonar 3 Mixing & Mastering, Craig Anderton mentions that you can try using decent bookshelf speakers and a subwoofer to compensate for the bookshelf speakers' lack of bass. So I've been using a cheap pair of Jensen C1 speakers and a NAD Series 20 amp... I just found an old labtec subwoofer (used usually with computer speakers that have a "sub-out" jack) and I plugged the subwoofer into a free channel of my headphone amp. So my speakers are in one channel, and the sub is in another. I turned the bass knob totally off for the speakers, so the only bass sound is coming from the subwoofer, and the highs are coming from the bookshelf speakers. So now that I have my makeshift speaker set up, is there a way I can properly tune them for my room? i.e. getting the subwoofer bass settings on the right levels might be interesting... I can adjust the volume and bass level on the subwoofer itself, AND I can adjust the bass on the sub's channel in the headphone amp. AND I need to figure out what's the optimum volume level for the subwoofer compared to the speakers. Yeah... Am I making sense?

Dave

RRabbi, I would mostly use your ears on this. Try a few mixes, and see how the mixes sound on other systems that you know. This is the best way to tune a system that I know, though it takes some time to do. If the mix sounds perfect on your system, but when you listen on other systems it sounds too bass-heavy or to bass-wimpy, you know that your studio setup is "lying" to you. The key is to listen on as many different systems as possible.

The acoustics of the room will play a huge role in tuning your monitoring system. The more bass trapping you have in the room the better (up to a point).