Widescreen Gaming Forum

I have a project kick started by a viewer donation. My first one EVER! and so to put that to use for the channel I am starting a project I have thought about doing for a long time. A DIY audio transducer setup for my computer to enhance the realism of my games/movies and make it seem as if I have a much better/better sound system than what I actually have.

I will break this down into parts and walk through each step of the build part by part. This build is good for everybody not just computer gamers as these are very nice for your car, sofa in the living area, bed, and other applications including I plan to try and make a hard of hearing or deaf person vibration alarm clock.

Video 1 is the introduction to the project and thanks to the viewers. Next video will be walking through what to buy and why.

Watch on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/SNwuqI0JS7Y

Watch Here:

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ViciousXUSMC on the Web - YouTube :: FaceBook :: Website

Thanks for putting this vid online. After watching I couldn't resist. The parts came yesterday and it's all up and running. Excellent idea.

The only issue I have is the speaker cable that now runs to my chair. Aside from that it works a treat. For anyone else here's a couple of pointers.

My mini amp hasn't arrived yet so I butchered an old surround sound amp that I had lying around. It's one of those £30 from the supermarket jobs... Not amazing but it's powerful enough. It had a built in sub so my first job was to cut the cable to the sub speaker.

1.) My surround sound amp it currently plugged into the front / Subwoofer port on my sound card. The idea being that the soundcard is sending the main bass signals down this cable.

2.) If you use an old surround sound amp do not connect your transducer to the center channel on the amp. I did and it acted more like a speaker than a transducer. Using either the left or right channel is much better. Only the bass seems to come through now, where as before I could hear voices coming from under my chair.

3.) The settings on my sound card (Xonar) allow me to tweak the bass output. e.g. LFE Crossover frequency. Setting this to around 55Hz gives a good effect, too high and again it will rumble all the time or act like a speaker.

Although it's not complicated to setup, perhaps it would be easier if I had a normal mini amp powering the transducer rather than a surround sound one. I don't have one here till the new one arrives and it's working nicely so no complaints from me.

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i7 3770k, P8Z77v Pro, 16gb Ram,2x Samsung 840 SSD RAID 0 + 4.5tb storage, 7970 Oc'd + 7950 in crossfire, 3x SP2309w monitors + 1 acer monitor, Asus D2X Xonar, Creative T40 Speakers plus satalite speakers + audio transducer

little question, i have no idea about that stuff.... but if i put that transducer on my couch and sit beneath it. i won't feel anything right `?

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We gonna send it to outa space!

I'm not sure I follow... you put the transducer on top of the couch and then you sit beneath the couch???



The transducer is simply a speaker that shakes. I have mine screwed into the bottom of my office chair. The chair is padded and I can feel the bass through the padding. It adds a nice effect to music and it works really nicely in games too. The only ones I've tried so far are;

Shift 2 Unleashed - good engine vibration feel which eases off when you take you foot of the gas
F1 2011 - Less of an engine vibration and more noticable when you go over rumble strips etc. The cars in this are more high pitched than bass driven so their engines have little effect on the transducer.
RAGE - Gun shots work very nicely.

What I have noticed tho is that I do need to adjust the volume on the amp to suit the game or music I'm using. Sometimes it causes the transducer to go crazy, other times it's minor vibrations. Perfectly normal it just depends on the source that's being played on it.

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i7 3770k, P8Z77v Pro, 16gb Ram,2x Samsung 840 SSD RAID 0 + 4.5tb storage, 7970 Oc'd + 7950 in crossfire, 3x SP2309w monitors + 1 acer monitor, Asus D2X Xonar, Creative T40 Speakers plus satalite speakers + audio transducer

hehe jup, so this thing vibrates and you have to mount it somewhere.
So because i have a Cloth Chair (similar to a couch) this wouldn't have any direct benefit! The only choice would be to screw it on the floor. (or unter the Table... bad idea... Monitors)

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We gonna send it to outa space!

You could open the fabric underneath the chair and then attach this to the frame work of the chair inside. If you open the fabric at the bottom edge then you could stable or sew it closed again.

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i7 3770k, P8Z77v Pro, 16gb Ram,2x Samsung 840 SSD RAID 0 + 4.5tb storage, 7970 Oc'd + 7950 in crossfire, 3x SP2309w monitors + 1 acer monitor, Asus D2X Xonar, Creative T40 Speakers plus satalite speakers + audio transducer

Nice work ViciousXUSMC, I look forward to watching your project unfold.

On thing that is of vital importance is controlling the transducer volume so you don't overdrive and shred it.

I had no resources to go the homemade route so I caved and got a Butt Kicker (cashed in a birthday). The addition is amazing, I would not game without Surround and the transducer now. So I thought I would throw my 2 cents in here with regards to my audio setup in case it helps anyone out (who can be bothered reading my wall of text).

I have always gamed with headphones as I find the audio from the mostly FPS I play to be obnoxious played through speakers and my wife sits about 3 feet away on her pc, so why ruin a good thing : )

My setup is : Logitech G35 7 channel headphones that run off their own USB plug as a separate audio device and mid priced Logitech 5 channel speaker setup that is primarily used for music. The beauty of the headphones on their own audio device is I set the G35's as the primary sound device and use Foobar http://www.foobar2000.org/ to play music over the speakers independently as Foobar allows you to select which output device to use and up-mixes to quad stereo with a very small system footprint.

So all game and system sounds come through the headphones. Now with a traditional transducer setup you tap off the sub channel or wire the amp in before the speakers and use the hi/low cut off that comes with the amp to remove the high end only leaving the bass. This only works when you use the desktop speakers obviously and I found the cut off to be not very accurate and some racing games have a more mid sound for their engine noises (Dirt 3 being a prime example, ill get back to that later).

I had an old pair of laptop headphones that came with their own USB dongle audio card, you can pick up a cheap one for less then $20 I see on ebay (http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/5-1CH-3D-USB-2-0-Audio-Sound-Card-Adapter-Headphone-MIC-For-Win7-64Bit-/221194577564?pt=AU_Components&hash=item338039669c), so this gives me an independent audio channel to drive the transducer.

So to use the transducer USB audio device I need a virtual way of splitting the primary channel and driving the transducer from its own audio device. This is a achieved with Virtual Audio Cable http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm, this allows me to create a virtual Line in / Line out. There is a demo avail that has a voice talking every couple of seconds but it will let you test it to see if it will work with your system. It is also an awesome way to record any audio in the same way you used to be able to "Record what you hear" with the old soundblaster card software.

So I now have a Virtual audio cable (Line 1) set as my Primary audio device, to get audio to my headphones I fire up the Audio Repeater (MME) that comes with VAC, set the wave in as the Line 1 and the Wave out as the G35's, set the Total buffer to 70, the buffers to 16 (you will need to try different values to remove Over and Underflows while removing noticeably audio latency on your system.

Now I want to control the frequency range being sent to the transducer, so I found a free VST plugin application : Cantabile Lite http://www.cantabilesoftware.com/lite/. Choose the Line 1 as the input and the transducer usb audio as the output.
I googled for free VST's and found a Crossover, a Graphic EQ and a High pass and Low pass filter (there are many other types of VST that you can use, these just worked for me). After several hours fiddling with the stack I have nearly completely removed the high / mid and boosted the mid / low. I actually recorded some game noise and used Foobar to play the mp3 through Line 1 giving me the ability to tune the setup without having to be in game.

As mentioned before with Dirt 3 the engine noises are quite high pitched and while using Cantabile to pitch the game noise down helped it was by no means ideal. I then discovered the Sim underground, X-Sim http://www.x-sim.de/forum/portal.php. The have a free sim application that can drive audio transducers and it was through that that I discovered that a few of the Codemasters driving games have a telemetry server built in.

I tried using the X-Sim software, but it was very complex and relied on user created content that was not overly accurate and I gave up in the end. This led me to Sim Commander http://simxperience.com/Products/Software/SimCommander3.aspx, its not cheap but it is very easy to use and supports most of the current racing sims http://simxperience.com/Products/Software/SimCommander3/SimCommanderSupportedSimulationGames.aspx. One thing to note specifically with Dirt 3, Code masters broke the telemetry server with the last update so you need to run D3 on the second to last patch for the telem server to work. Once it is working though its brilliant as you don't get the game music, announcer etc triggering the transducer, only the engine and impacts.

Stoked for you guys, I guarantee you wont go back once you have played anything with a transducer in the mix !

Ok well althought I thought that everything was running smoothly I found a problem with my setup.

I do have a gaming headset which is 5.1 and if I use this everything is great. Also, if I play a driving game and use my speakers everything I've heard so far is great.

BUT here is my problem. I have my speakers (Creative T40s) plugged into the front channel of my Xonar D2X card. Sound comes out fine. I then have my sub plugged into my center / sub channel. Sub works fine...When I play the first few minutes of Farcry 3 though I found that I can't hear any voices. The reason is the sound settings for my card have to be set to 5.1 in order to get the transducer to work off the sub channel. But I have no center speaker.

If I set it back to two speakers, I can hear everything clearly but no transducer.

If I hook up a dodgey center speak all is good, but.... I have no rear speakers which farcry thinks I should have, and also the center speaker is controlled in line with the transducer. So if I turn it down I get little or no vibration, turn it up, lots of vibration but the voices are way too loud. Another problem that this brings is that if I use headphones, I then have to disconnect my center speaker otherwise sound will come out of it all the time I want to use the transducer.

Finally, if I hook up the transducer to the same channel as my two speakers, it plays every sound like a speaker.

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i7 3770k, P8Z77v Pro, 16gb Ram,2x Samsung 840 SSD RAID 0 + 4.5tb storage, 7970 Oc'd + 7950 in crossfire, 3x SP2309w monitors + 1 acer monitor, Asus D2X Xonar, Creative T40 Speakers plus satalite speakers + audio transducer

after seeing the topic I was excited to build one for myself too well to finish the race cockpit for a kit I'm on it!

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Sorry my bad english!


My Wallpapers For Multi Display Monitors => http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22137

Well I caved in. I ordered a couple of sets of cheapish speakers to that way my room is setup in surround sound properly. The Transducer can then simply act as my sub. The only issue I had was that I didn't have a speaker in the center channel so voices in some games weren't heard. Will update on this once speakers arrive later today.

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i7 3770k, P8Z77v Pro, 16gb Ram,2x Samsung 840 SSD RAID 0 + 4.5tb storage, 7970 Oc'd + 7950 in crossfire, 3x SP2309w monitors + 1 acer monitor, Asus D2X Xonar, Creative T40 Speakers plus satalite speakers + audio transducer