Robb Report Home Entertainment and Design – Brent Butterworth, Executive Editor
“The effect sucks us into the action…”
Home theater enthusiasts love the visceral thrill you get when a large subwoofer shakes the floor. Unfortunately, there is usually a spoilsport around who insists they turn the sound down. One compromise is a tactile transducer, a special kind of speaker that shakes the floor or your couch while producing almost no audible bass. Combine a tactile transducer with a small subwoofer, and you get the feel of a muscular home theater system without annoying bass boom leaking into the rest of your home.
Crowson Technology’s TES 100 is probably the easiest tactile transducer to install—just slip one under each back leg of your couch, put spacers under the front legs, and you’re done.
Until the Crowson Technology TES 100 came along, tactile transducers were complicated to install; you had to bolt them to your floor joists or the underside of your couch, or construct a seating platform to which they could be attached. The TES 100 is different. You place each of your couch’s back legs on one of the inch-high TES 100 transducers, place the front legs on spacers, connect the transducers to Crowson’s A200 amplifier, and connect the amp to the subwoofer output of your receiver or surround-sound processor.
Crowson Technology supplies the A200 amplifier with its TES 100 tactile transducers, and wisely includes a built-in filter circuit so only low bass sounds can excite the transducers.
After fine-tuning the level controls on the A200—and switching the transducers to the front legs of our couch, where they work far better—we get an enjoyable effect. Even when we use the Pinnacle SUBcompact6 with the TES 100s, it feels almost as if we’d moved four of the M Design Godfather supersubs into our room. The couch vibrates gratifyingly with every explosion, adding realism impossible to achieve with a small sub. The effect sucks us into the action…
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