ButtKicker BK-LFE Low Frequency Effects System

I have a home theater and I have installed the Aurora bass shakers in the past... they work OK and give you some good feedback. Then I stepped it up and invested in the Buttkicker LFE.. I have 2 rows of 3 theater seats and I bought 1 LFE for each row. I mounted them to the frame under the middle non-reclining seat (see pictures) and I am driving these 2 in a series by the Dayton SA1000 amplifier. This is a great setup, I generally only need to have the gain at around halfway to drive a great experience in the 2 seats. I got creative mounting these because I knew they needed to be solid... so I found these aluminum 1" extrusion bars from "8020" and mounted them to the frames with T-nuts. Overall, I don't see how this could have been done any better and I am very happy with the outcome. Remember if you run more than 1 Buttkicker LFE on a single amp, run the wires in a "series" to get the most out of the amp.

I have a Clark and a Buttkicker. Clark is rated for 250 watts, Buttkicker is over 1000 watts. Buttkicker was twice the price, so I bought the less expensive Clark first. The application was the long roof of a bare metal limousine: It has the perfect resonant surface area for 0.0001 Hz through 150 Hz. It would be a giant subsonic subwoofer. The Clark worked (functionally), but I made one miscalculation, and two horrible mistakes. I miscalculated the force required to be applied to the roof for proper roofline deflection. The Clark only provided about 50% of the desired effect. The first mistake was pretesting it without mounting it first to a solid surface. Applying ~125 watts caused it to overheat, and it smelled like the voice coil was burning. The second mistake (fatal) was driving it with the out-of-range intermittently peaking signal of ~325 watts. It happily took the abuse until the internal guts failed and broke loose. It sounded like ball-bearings in a coffee can. Although it has internal overcurrent protection, driving it at just under its threshold can still significantly reduce its lifespan. Next, The Buttkicker is different. It does not operate on a voice coil/permanent magnet arrangement. Instead, the BC is a linear actuator / motor. It can handle the current, and based on my application, it thoroughly enjoys the abuse. There is one major requirement that I have not found listed anywhere, and you will thank me for sharing the following fact: Do NOT use a Class D amplifier to drive your low-frequency tactile transducers. It barely works... it hardly works... do not waste your time with cheaper, energy-efficient, smaller, cooler Class D amplifiers. The answer is A, but all you will find is AB. Class AB amplifiers will reproduce frequencies below 5Hz with huge amounts of power and force. You NEED this for your transducer. The last consideration when building your transducer/amplifier system is filtering. You must completely filter out anything above 250 Hz. You will need to let your subwoofers punch out anything higher than that. Going higher than 200Hz will strain the transducer, and there is no internal filtering that will prevent it from trying to buzz itself to pieces. My car stereo has menu options to electronically adjust a low-pass crossover, and has a dedicated subwoofer output (Kenwood $250 dual-DIN). The amplifier I am using is a bridged R.F. Renegade 550 (probably 450 watt peak). It has band pass and subsonic amplification control knobs. I am considering upgrading to a higher wattage amp because after about 25 minutes of SHAKING the car at 7Hz, it overheats, and shuts down. It does auto-reset, no permanent damage is done. The amount of action I get from my 550 watt amp is too much for the car to handle. I have had to bolt things back together throughout the car. Windows shake out of their tracks, a side mirror fell off, people are hurting their necks from turning to look. It really is too much, but think about it this way: the trunk is empty, and my wallet is phat. The money invested is $600 between the head unit, the transducer, and the amp, but the system sounds like I invested a few thousand! To summarize: FILTER CLASS AB BUTTKICKER 1000watt 8 AWG (30A fused at the battery) A SOCKET SET CONTACT ADHESIVE ICE DARK SUNGLASSES (and preferribly an old 6-door Cadillac service limousine) ___________________ Please share this information everywhere you can, you all have my permission. I couldn't find these answers on the internet, nobody tries stuff like this anymore. I hope my efforts will save someone some time and money. -Nathan, PDX

Way better than the buzzy shakers that you can find for $50~. This moves the chairs! In a good way, if dialed in correctly. Correctly being: volume, DSP controlled frequency response, and if you can set an audio compressor—-to tame the loud sounds a little, while leaving the softer parts untouched.

With this Buttkicker LFE (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007P98K6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and the Dayton Audio SA1000 Subwoofer Amplifier (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IAA2A8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), it will literally shakes the entire condo (and my neighbor's too!)... way overkill for a small condo, but WOW!, makes any action movie a true "experience"... Needs some really heavy furniture to keep it planted to the floor (with the standard mounting base/bracket) when you really cranked it (or at certain frequencies).. it can start to hop/flap all over the place, losing a ton of quality/performance (proper mounting/installation is key to performance)... Certainly beats the pants off of my Buttkicker Gamer2 with 90-watt amp (the smaller Gamer2 is still great for a solid/heavy chair mount, but a little light for a home theater with large heavy furniture when you want to REALLY feel the power). I did have to buy a small table-top fan to keep it cool though, since it does get REALLY hot to the touch when I drive it REALLY hard for a long time (super low-frequency at a "constant" high volumes--good ventilation is essential)... that's why only four stars.

Way stronger than I imagined. Bought this and mounted it to a single recliner. Started the movie with my buttkicker amp at half power. The transducer sounded like it was going to blow up my chair and shook me to my bones. I turned the amp down to about 15%with high pass cutoff at 50hz and it blends very well with my SVS sub. I am sad though that there isn't a way to mount this to 2 of my recliners at once. That is not buttkicker fault though but my chairs. I will have to fork up another 350 for my wife's chair, sigh

sensation au top agréable lors d un bon film ou d un concert s accompagne bien avec un caisson de basse . au top je recommande avec bonne ampli plus de 1000 watt et nécessaire en classe D

Simply amazing.