This stuff is really work, man! If you have no idea how it feel, come to my place and try it yourself!

"Highly Recommended by Tum"

With the Clark Synthesis Tactile Sound Transducer (TST), the intimate sensation of feeling sound is no longer just imagination. We hear music, the human voice, a thunderous clap trailing a bolt of lightning. We experience vibrations created by natural and mechanical means and know the sensation as sound. A simple concept. Pull a bow across the strings of a violin, the strings vibrate and the wave is transmitted in pulses through the mass of the wood in the instrument, then through the air stimulating nerves in the inner ear. We have always accepted this to be the ultimate experience of sound. A single sense stimulated by the dynamic impression of sound waves. But, we have only experienced half the sensation. The transducer is 2 inches in depth and 8 inches in diameter, making it easy to install in chairs, sofas, dance floors, decks, car seats... The result is an exhilarating, or relaxing, interactive experience in which the action of motion or the essence of music is "captured" and transferred via vibration to the sense of touch.


Tactile. A sensation perceived by the sense of touch; pressure or traction exerted on the skin is perceived; sensitivity to vibration or movement to stimulation of nerves.
Sound. A sensation perceived by a particular auditory impression; mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (as air) and is the objective cause of hearing
Revolution. A fundamental change in the way one perceives the world as in experiences, beliefs, and convictions; as in Tactile/Sound: the future of experiencing sound.


You have 2 choices to install the TST. One is under the floor and another one is under your couch. For the best result, buy 2 set of TSTs and install them in both places.
 


Here is the review from HomeTheater Magazine!
Sound is more than just something you hear. It's also a feeling, and I don't mean the "my gal done left me and I'm cryn' in my beer" kind of feeling. I'm talking about a physical feeling, that connection you make when the sound actually creates a sensation in your skin and bones. It's irresistible: A good techno tune could turn Jesse Helms into a dancin' fool, and the crashes and explosions in a well-recorded movie soundtrack could make even Arnold Schwarznegger himself jump out of his chair.

Most of that feeling comes from the bass. Because your ears aren't very sensitive to low frequencies, speakers have to move a lot of air for you to hear bass clearly. And when there's a lot of air moving, a lot of other things move too - like the floor, your chair, the walls, and even your body. That's why when people want to feel movies and music as much as hear them, they install a big subwoofer. Which is a good thing, except that most of the subs out there can't give you much of a tactile sensation before they distort, or their electronic limiter kicks in. And even if the sub can crank out serious shakes, you have to turn it up so loud to get that effect that your nerves (not to mention your ears) don't last long. So you settle for just a hint of shake, rattle, and roll - but you always wish you had more.

I'm done settling, though, because I've finally found a product that gives me more tactile sensation than any subwoofer can produce. It's a plastic flying saucer-lookin' thing called the Clark Synthesis Absolute Tactile Transducer.

Dumb idea, right? Like those bass-shakers that teenage miscreants install under their car seats? That's just what I thought when I walked into the Clark Synthesis booth at a recent trade show. Even though the company's hype sheet said the product is in use in military simulators and on Disney rides, I had serious doubts. And my initial impressions weren't any different - they had the effect turned up so far that the shaking on the T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park was just ludicrous. But I could tell there was something really great lurking in that demo, and I thought that maybe, with a Home Theater approved setup and a little tweaking, I might be able to get a useful effect out of these things. I asked for a pair to play with, so Clark Synthesis president Curt Clark brought a full Absolute Sound System (two transducers and a stereo amp) out to my house in New Jersey, and helped me install them.

Each of the 8-inch-diameter transducers incorporates a 20-ounce neodymium magnet in a patented structure. Neodymium's many times as powerful as the magnetic materials used in most speaker drivers, and this is the biggest neodymium magnet structure I've yet encountered ( and a big reason each Tactile Transducer costs $510). There's a polyswitch inside that automatically shuts the transducer off if it receives a signal over 135 watts RMS. Clark Synthesis provides a permanently mounted 18/2 cable for hookup ( no binding posts).

A threaded socket on top lets you attach the Tactile Transducer to...well, you can hook one up to your couch, your floor joists, your wall, or whatever. The package includes T-nuts, bolts, and screw posts - enough hardware for practically any mounting situation.

Installing the transducers didn't tax my technical or motor skills, but in my case, it did involve drilling through the floor to run the wires, picking through insulation, kneeling in dirt and getting a spider bite, unstapling and restapling the fabric on the bottom of the couch, and other hardcore, dirty DIY-type chores. Although installing these things is a hell of a lot more complicated than putting in a subwoofer, it's the kind of thing that retired fathers love to do and are usually pretty good at. So if you've got one, change the Ease of Use rating from a 2 to a 5.


After spending years fretting about using high-quality speaker cable and connectors, it was really a gas to use crappy zip cord here and not worry about it - after all, these transducers are as much akin to motors as they are to speakers, and don't require much special treatment. And I really dug it when Curtis and I connected them using wire nuts! (No, they weren't solid brass or gold-plated, just plain yellow plastic.) You can choose among many different ways to hook up the transducers, depending on the effect you want. In any case, you have to drive them with a separate amp, preferably one rated at a minimum of 100 watts per channel. You can even use an old receiver as long as it's a pretty good one. The amp must have its own volume or input level controls, so you can adjust the intensity of the tactile effect.

Curtis and I decided to connect the amp ( which is manufactured for Clark Synthesis by Carver ) to my system, which currently comprises an AMC AV81HT preamp/processor, an ADA PTM-6150 amp, and Mirage M-890 main speakers. The hookup we chose required two Y-adapters. We fed the left - and right-channel signals connecting one leg of each Y-adapter to the amp, and the other leg to a cable that ran to one of the amp's inputs. Because the Mirages have plenty of bass, I don't use a subwoofer, so the speakers (and the transducers) got a full-range signal.

The Tactile Transducer is actually a full-range driver, with a rated response of 5 to 20,000 Hertz. This means that unless you some how filter the midrange and high frequencies out of the signal, you could hear voices coming from the transducer. Not only do these things not reproduce voices clearly when mounted under a floor or couch , but it definitely spoils the realism of the sound when the dialogue's coming from under your couch. (Curtis tells me, though, that the company sells transduers to hearing-impaired people for exactly this purpose; apparently the tactile sound helps them to understand speech.) Mounting the transducers under the floor did a pretty nice job of filtering out the mids and highs, but the transducer under the couch definitely needed some help. One solution would be to use a Y-adapter and the subwoofer output of a pre/pro to feed both your subwoofer and the Carver amp ( the subwoofer output will have the mid and high frequencies filtered out ). Another, which contributing editor Felipe Jones suggested to me, is to insert F-MOD low-pass filters on the inputs of the amp. A 100-Hertz filter should suffice; for more info on F-MODs check out Tech Talk in this issue. So how'd the Tactile Transducer sound, er, uh, feel? Nothing short of awesome. Even with the system totally untweaked, and without the couch transducer installed, I was blown away. I fired up the Twister laserdisc, which features an overwhelming Dolby Digital soundtrack , and held on tight as the whole room vibrated right along. This effect didn't seem like an effect at all - it seemed to blend right in with the bass from my Mirages, augmenting them without in any way diminishing the quality of the bass coming from the speakers.

I was really happy with the sound from just the floor transducers, but Curtis insisted we mount a third in the couch. The couch transducer, obviously, gave me a higher ratio of butt vibration to foot vibration, and a more realistic effect. The vibrations aren't just limited to the couch, either; they travel into the floor and give the other chairs in the room a little shake, too. With the couch transducer, though, you really need to have some low-pass filtering. While it was kind of neat having Helen Hunt's voice make my butt tingle, it wasn't very realistic.

For people who have access to their floor joists, I think the cool setup is to place one transducer in the floor and one in the couch, turning the floor transducer all the way up, and turning the couch transducer down halfway (which helps ameliorate the voices-in-the-butt effect). Big rooms might require two or three floor transducers. And if you don't have access to your floor joists, Clark Synthesis offers inexpensive riser systems that elevate your chairs or couch a couple of inches so you can mount a transducer underneath.

On movie sound, this setup gave me such a hugely enjoyable improvement in my system that I've come to believe tactile sound is an absolute must. For music, I wasn't as conviced - the Tactile Transducers produced a neat effect, but I don't think it made the sound more realistic. My housemates, though, strongly disagreed; they really dug what the transducers did on bass-heavy stuff like Black Uhuru, and even on softer Stan Getz tunes. Much to my suprise, the lady of the house did not complain. To the contrary, she really dug the effect! But I couldn't stop there - I figured that with even more tweaking, I could achieve the ultimate in tactile sensation. So I tried running the line-level signal to the Clark amp through a couple of guitar effects boxes ( a Boss graphic equalizer and a Digi-Tech digital delay ) to see just how good tactile could get. By pushing the 100 Hz slider up on the EQ and pulling all the others down, then playing with the 200Hz slider, I was able to dial in the perfect amount of tactile lower midrange. Then I tried adding about 8 milliseconds of delay to the transducers, which ( in my room ) synchronized them better with the woofers. This was an especially interesting excercise, because for all the tweaking, I was basically doing critical listening with my butt! ( Some manufacturers and readers have suggested, however, that I've been doing this all along.) Anyways, after my tweaking sessions, the system was dialed - I didn't want to watch videos without it. Hell, I didn't want to leave the room!

After my experiments, I'm convinced that the simplest way to get these things tweaked up is to hook up an inexpensive stereo equalizer between your pre/pro or receiver and the Clark amp. That way, you can easily fine-tune the response of each transducer, for an added cost of about $100. And if you want to go all the way and throw in a cheap delay box, so much the better.

I'll say no more, except for this: I think tactile sound will soon become a required, expected part of the home theater experience, as essential as a big-screen TV or a center speaker. I strongly recommend you go check it out.



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