I make Techno. I would like to "feel" the sub in a way that doesn't require me to have a subwoofer. I know of things like Subpac but they don't sell them anymore. Do you know of anything else like this or if it is relatively easy to make one?
If he is looking to get the bass feeling of the music you want the pure input.
And the ButtKickers are purely mechanical, so no DSP. I would steer towards their Concert line as it's meant specifically for music, whereas the LFE has a stronger response from 20-30hz for home theater type applications.
For the buttkicker the real issue is the chair itself. It filters a ton of stuff and rattles.
A good experience are the Dbox chairs, the problem is that they cost 5 k.
Relevant club podcast with the CTO https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ERkgfJxm7QCZlp1p5eIGD?si=E...
I wrote few of these algorithms myself for some other products.
There is always a trade off between fidelity and immersive feeling because the basses were not meant to be used with such product in mind.
With my company, Interhaptics, we built a full stack pipeline only for haptics. Our tech is at the basis of the MPEG haptics encoding standard coming out shortly.
We have been recently acquired by Razer, look out for news of you are interested to build for touch natively
Get a well know console controller, take out the two actuators and mount them in any other form factors you like.
You can drive them with an audio pipeline, they are effectively a 4 ohm speaker. Attach them to a sound card and you can have your stereo haptics subwoofers.
You have to filter out aggressively the resonance frequency of the actuator to get a flattish response. Not that subpac or the other folks do so
The key is to mount them properly on the body to maximize mechanical coupling. You don’t need a lot of watts if the losses are almost zero.
If you want more, build an array of actuators and spread them out.
More immersive feeling compared to a stronger one.