Bass Shakers - 1x 100W or 2x 35W

[iGPR3]

I’m looking to buy a bass shaker or two for my sim racing setup, and wondered what the best setup would be.

 

I’m considering either a single 100W amp with one 100W RMS bass shaker, or running a 2x 50W amp with 2x 35W RMS shakers.

 

My question is: would 2 shakers be a much clearer experience, despite them both being a lot smaller than the 100W model? And would it be worth paying the extra price for them over the 100W one?

[cmndr]

Which shakers are you looking at?

Also, I'd assume that for a modest size set up, 1 bigger better shaker would work better. 

[iGPR3]

21 minutes ago, cmndr said:

Which shakers are you looking at?

Also, I'd assume that for a modest size set up, 1 bigger better shaker would work better. 

Either 1 Reckhorn BS-200i or 2 Dayton Audio BST-2s (which are actually 35W RMS so I’ll update my post)

[cmndr]

So not super familiar with the reckhorn or your pricing but in the "kinda cheap budget" range the aurasound ast-2b-4 gets a good chunk of recommendations. I think I paid around $50USD each for mine. 

[iGPR3]

On 11/8/2023 at 8:50 PM, cmndr said:

So not super familiar with the reckhorn or your pricing but in the "kinda cheap budget" range the aurasound ast-2b-4 gets a good chunk of recommendations. I think I paid around $50USD each for mine. 

My budget is roughly £110 for both a decent amp and a shaker or two. I might wait and see what black friday deals bring for amps, as that will leave more headroom price wise for a better shaker.

 

The reckhorn is probably my best bet I think. The aurasound has 50W RMS which I'm sure would be enough but its actually quite a bit more expensive here in the UK, with the reckhorn being only roughly £45 and the aurasound being £60. I think I'll probably get one reckhorn for my chair for now, and if I like it, look into getting a smaller or lower wattage one for the front and back of my rig.

 

As far as amps are concerned, do you think something like this nobsound amp would be suitable for now? Or should I go with something like this bit beefier one in case I wanted the extra power?

[cmndr]

I'm going to guess that you're probably fine with the options you're looking at. I want to emphasize that I'm not that familiar with UK pricing or products. 

One unfortunate thing is that if audio quality is kind of black magic/snake oil, then tactile transducers are a bit worse. There's been less discussion and research, measurement is harder and there's A LOT of interaction with the seating that they're used with. I'd like to think I'm a fairly smart guy and the tactile transducer set up (out of 4 experiments) that produced the best subjective experience was the one that I thought was the dumbest going in (one transducer directly onto the spring array on my couch, which in theory you'd expect to act as a damper). You pretty much NEED to experiment with transducer positioning. I tried 4 different configs on my couch. 

I'd say go for not the absolute cheapest transducers, you can always double up on your reckhorn if you want more later. 

AVS forum has a subwoofer/transducer section though I've found some of the advice there to be from people who are excited but a bit less than scientific/knowledgeable. Still probably worth skimming over. 

One thing to be aware of, watts only loosely translates to performance/intensity. You can get a high wattage transducer that's inefficient and doesn't do much. With that said, price does loosely (very loosely) correlate with performance/intensity with the $20ish options having a lot less heft than the $50ish options. My suspicion is that after $50ish the benefits scale a lot less directly but I haven't tried EVERYTHING. 

[VoidX]

I have the old BST-1. It's so strong I ended up limiting it to 10 watts. For an entire bed.

[iGPR3]

20 hours ago, VoidX said:

I have the old BST-1. It's so strong I ended up limiting it to 10 watts. For an entire bed.

So would you say that i’d be best going for a bit beefier but lower wattage model instead of a less beefy higher wattage? Like instead of a smaller 100W model, go for a larger 50W instead? I’ve been looking for shakers and so far there hasn’t been any black friday sales.. the BST1 is looking pretty good for only £60 on amazon.

[VoidX]

On 11/19/2023 at 5:02 PM, iGPR3 said:

So would you say that i’d be best going for a bit beefier but lower wattage model instead of a less beefy higher wattage?

I'm saying these things are super strong, even the smallest ones, so in my opinion, the best choice is the cheapest.