me to, just trying to decide how many of the actual vibrating units I would need. I assume one for the stage for the rear seating, and maybe one to attach to the Dricor floating subflooring to rattle the front rows..
Based on my experience one per row should be sufficient if like in your case each row of seats is sitting on a stage/riser or something other than just the floor. They do make smaller units that in my opinion would be appropriate for individual chair mounting. IMO a full size Buttkicker is overkill for a single chair. Hell if mounted directly to the frame one Buttkicker is overkill for a couch which is why it works fine just using the “foot” pad and resting a couch leg on it. I am just using a modified version of that by attaching mine to a 2x4 and resting the back legs of my three chairs on it. Works great.
What if it makes your chair rattle?
I imagine if the BK is going to rattle your chair there’s a good chance the subwoofer would too. I’ve used both my BK and EP500 in two different rooms and never had the BK rattle my seats. OTOH my EP500 has always make something rattle that I subsequently had to locate and “lock down.”
I’ve read up on Buttkickers a lot and don’t remember ever running across anyone having a rattling problem. The only operation issue like that I’ve read about was someone who had it resonating (chair mode as opposed to room mode?) with their couch at a certain frequency. AFAIR the result was being to strong at that frequency and taking extra time for the vibration to dissipate (decay). I’ve also read of people having the dissipation problem if their mounting surface be it a riser or the seat, if mounted directly, is not very ridged.
In both case I’ve used a BK the frequency response and attack/decay are superior to the subwoofer. I imagine It’s because I only run the BK below 40Hz which is to long a wave to resonate with my seating.
Another potential problem with integrating a BK with a sub is setting the distance if you have a subwoofer with DSP. Unless you have a receiver with separate calibrated outputs then the sub and BK are going to be out of sync by how ever many feet the subs DSP chip adds.
One more potential issue is if the receiver applies a heavy correction to some part of the bass that the BK is also playing, that correction is also going to the BK which not suffering from a room mode will now be under powered. In this case a second calibrated subwoofer output could simply be run hot to make up for some of this which IMO would cause a big problem if your only running the BK over a small range like I am, 40Hz > 5Hz.
