Dayton Audio TT25-8 Puck Tactile Transducer Mini Bass Shaker 8 Ohm

This was a very cheap way for me to add some depth to my home theater system. I moved my subwoofer to another stereo in the house because the fronts on my surround system can reach pretty low and I didn't think I'd miss it. But then I missed it. I could still hear a good amount of bass in general but some of the feel of it was gone. Movies and music got a little more remote. I don't care for a carnival ride of rumbling for every deep note in a movie or music but I like it to be hyper-realistic and immersive.I realized I had an old receiver sitting in a closet and I could run one of these bass shakers with it through the subwoofer out on my ht receiver. And it works great. For a while I had it bolted to the bottom of the couch. At times it just seems like the sounds you're hearing are also shaking the room and it really gives the impression of being louder without actually being louder. Immersive. Cool.But other times it's just a simple thing like a character closing a door and the thing wiggles your butt. Pretty distracting and dumb.So I attached it to a big plywood panel on a bar that is right behind the couch. The couch is pushed right up against the bar. So what happens is the plywood is acting as an exciter speaker to some degree and you can actually hear the bass the shaker is producing. And it shakes the couch in a more passive, subtle way that is very realistic. It was just lucky that I have this bar behind the couch and this works so well but the upshot is that I made my system sound better and feel better for only 16 bucks. And it was fun experimenting with different placements.Now I'm getting ideas for using a large, suspended panel of plywood to try to create a free-standing subwoofer in the room. Just for kicks.

I have found that anything more than 40 watts per transducer makes them vibrate so violently they rattle their own enclosure. I have a cheap dinky 75 watt per channel driving 2 of these in stereo, and that amp was overkill. I do recommend low pass filtering though, otherwise certain frequencies will turn parts of the seat you are vibrating into a speaker cone, and you will hear it, and it doesn't sound good.The vibration violence peaks around 40hz.When watching movies, I down mix the stereo input into dual mono, but when playing games, I keep the vibrations stereo. Helps with positional awareness, especially since the tactility can be a bit shocking.Take the time to drill center holes for the transducers and mount it like you would a speaker. Otherwise the mounting rim will be nudging against the side of the transducer during vibrations, and it will start making noise from less power than it should.I also own a butt kicker... and that transducer earns that title. You can drive it so hard it physically hurts. Personally, i think that is overkill for most people, and it is much harder to drive for the vibrations you get out. The butt kicker also has tendancies to overheat if kept fully enclosed. The ambient heat from the buttkick melted the pho-leather covering I used to hide it when it was mounted in my living room, so I had to keep it free to open air.For how small these are and how well they perform, I would go as far as to recommend a couple of these over a buttkicker for most people. Even though you can get more out of the buttkicker, it is a pain in the butt to work with, pun intended :)

I bought two of these because I could never give my system a work out. I have always lived in pretty close proximity to others with paper thin walls. While my existing sound system only pushes 18watts to the sub-woofer these units solved the issues I had with cutting out the low end of my sound system so as not to disturb the neighbors and room mates.If you've done your research on these, or shakers in general, I can confirm the hype that they immensely improve your listening experience to movies music and gaming. They are not very big but they make a world of difference when listening to content with a vibrant soundscape in the low end. They aren't perfect but they are impressive for the price range.Technical and instillation-as you can see from the image these have pretty small leads, I belive its about 6”. they are also not very thick so putting to much stress on them could result in pulling the leads straight out of the houseing. Make sure you wire them correctly the first time or you could quickly run out of slack leads.These should also be considered low end pro units. The instructions that come with these are pretty sparing but they recommend that you drill out a hole in what ever surface you are mounting them to. While these units can be pretty robust and rugged if you don't heed the instructions on this point you risk damaging the shakers. Restricting the movement or burying your units will shorten their lifespan. While they don't get very hot- they do need airflow, while they are designed to shake the object they are mounted to- they do need their full range of motion when they are permanently mounted.I've seen people reviewing these on Youtube who just screwed them to the bottom of office chairs and I would not recommend that. While it would give you an extra kick for a while eventually the lack of range would either limit the output (audio range) or damage the units over time. Admittedly its not practical to get a hole saw and carve out divots in the bottom of an office chair it is practical to hit the hardware store and get a few pieces of scrap 2x6 to do the job and more than likely they'll be free.Furthermore, as has already been mentioned, the leads are pretty short and thin. When you install this to an object you should make sure to include adequate slack in your wires and possibly a quick release. I accomplished this by getting some RCA extension cables from GoodWill and just patching the sockets to the ends of my wires.Most consumer sound systems do not support external sub-woofers. If you have a decent 2.1 or higher system then these will work fine for you. The important part is to be aware of the resistance of both the shakers you are installing and the resistance of your existing driver (listed here in Ohms, this product specifically 8ohm). My system has a 4ohm driver so I had to wire my units in parallel so they would work correctly. If you do not respect this you could damage either the shakers or your sound system.You could hypotheticaly still use your driver along side your shakers but expect a performance ding from doing so. In much the same way as you can wire an 8ohm 10watt speaker to a 4ohm 4watt channel you will get much quieter audio because of differences in voltage and resistance.I would also recommend taking the time to wire up your shakers “non-permanently” with some sort of quick release. I used my Goodwill connectors to route the lines to my sub-woofer outside my speaker box so I could chose either my shakers or my driver at any given time. If you have the experience or the time you could create a circuit that toggles between your inbuilt driver or your shakers but I opted for the manual approach.The TL;DR of this review is that I am very impressed with these little pucks. They are quite small and very much worth the money. I opted for 2, not that I had much choice knowing the specs of my sound system, and they are very affordable. I did the research on these units, and while instillation instructions where hard to find the rave reviews can be confirmed. They take a mediocre sound system and make it awesome. It changes a loud sound system that keeps your neighbors awake to a personal experience for you only. If you aren't afraid of wiring something up yourself I would highly recommend buying these!