Well, I arrived home from work today to two large, and very heavy packages.
My Buttkickers had arrived!
First of all, a huge thanks goes out to Sonnie and to Roman, for organizing the contest (The Ultimate Home Theater Giveaway), providing the awesome prize (not just one but TWO buttkickers), and for being especially accommodating with the shipping to me here in Toronto.
Tonight I'll deal with the installation portion of my thread, and then after I've had some time with them I'll move on to the review. So as I said, I had 2 boxes to open. The full kit box turned out to be many boxes, and packed quite well. When I got the goods out and lined up, I was pretty impressed with the size of the shakers themselves. the pics don't do justice, but they're almost the size of cantaloupes!
We looked at the install kit, and pondered a few options before turning the couch over to inspect the bottom. The couch is a recliner, so I figured it would be jammed full of levers and hinges underneath, but as it turned out there was a perfect space to mount a shaker, and there were already even holes (we had to drill one since they didn't line up right) in the metal frame. The packaged rubber damper feet were the perfect height to make up the difference after the shaker was mounted, and all in all I think I was pretty lucky with the minimal amount of work we had to do to have them integrate so well. We only had time to do one couch tonight, but I'll get the other one done on the weekend.
I had a few goof-ups, like plugging the splitter into the digital coax audio-in cable instead of the sub (it was dark and cramped behind my receiver) which thankfully didn't do any damage. Then when I did get it plugged in properly, I had some serious ground loop hum. After learning all about this to install my BFD, I just went the easy route and slapped a cheater plug on the amp, and everything worked great.
I found out that I can't turn the volume past half when the receiver is turned up close to reference level, or else I gott jagged white diagonal lines across the (CRT) TV. I'm guessing the amp, receiver, sub, TV, etc. are maybe drawing too much off the same circuit? It went away when I turned everything down a bit. I have the high filter set to around 60Hz, and the volume to about 10 - 11:00, just for the initial playing around. I used a few scenes from LOTR:FOTR to test with, mostly the cave troll, escape from Moria, and Balrog scenes. In short, I was impressed! The "hits" really matched the rumbling from the sub well. I'll get into more detail after I've had a chance to listen to some more, and tweak a bit, but my initial impression is that these are a really fun addition and I think I'm going to like them a lot.
More to come!
P.S. sorry for the phone cam pics, it was handy and I was too lazy to find batteries for the real camera.