Home Theater Hacks

Hack #40. Add Bass Shakers to Feel the Lows

Everyone's home theater has bass, but with bass shakers, you can ensure that your listeners not only hear the bass, but also feel it.

Bass shakers could very well be one of the best "bang for the buck" additions to any home theater. Yes, a 5.1 home theater audio system gives you the full range of aural dimension but adding these bass shakers, more formally called tactile transducers, can bring a new and exciting dimension of feeling to the sights and sounds of your home theater.

Not only will you see and hear action in whatever you are watching, but you will also feel it! Bass shakers allow you to experience every thump, thrust, and shake...the way bass sound was originally intended.

What Is a Bass Shaker?

As already mentioned, a bass shaker is a tactile transducer. Tactile refers to touch, and a transducer is simply a device that converts energy of one form (sound) into another (motion). So, a tactile transducer converts audio into something that you not only hear, but also feel.

In the case of a bass shaker, I'm talking about an electromechanical device that shakes (yes, it literally shakes). It's similar to a loudspeaker woofer driver, but without the cone. The bass shaker is connected to an audio amplifier and mounted to a solid object such as your sofa, loveseat, wall, or even floor (see Figure 5-2). When the low-frequency signals from your home theater are fed to it, the vibration is transmitted to the object it's mounted to, hence ...