News

• The Good: Gives you the feeling of bass without a subwoofer; works even when you're wearing headphones; good selection of controls for fine-tuning force-feedback-type sensations; top-notch materials and workmanship; easy setup.
• The Bad: Controls need constant, delicate tweaking so that vibrations don't turn to outright rattles, clanks and buzzes; no remote, which means the large and heavy control box needs to be kept within arm's reach; won't work on all chairs; unit sometimes overheats and shuts down after a couple of hours of intense use; cable trailing from your chair can be annoying; pricey.
• The Verdict: This gadget gives hard-core players bass they can feel instead of hear - games become more realistic and the rest of the household will thank you.
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REVIEW:

When I first heard about the ButtKicker Gamer, I thought it was yet another of those totally pointless gadgets you see disappointed owners unloading at yardsales. It soon changed my mind — it won't appeal to everyone, but if you're a hardcore gamer, this will likely go straight onto your I-want-it list.

The $149.99 (U.S.) ButtKicker is basically a force-feedback system for your desk chair. I know, I gave the same snort of derision before I tried it.

In fact, it's difficult to describe the ButtKicker to someone who hasn't tried it. The best analogy I can think of is a really loud concert, the kind where you can feel the bass in your body if you're too close to the speaker stacks. The ButtKicker does the same sort of thing, but without turning your eardrums to mush.

In fact, it's almost silent.

That's the remarkable thing about it. When you sit on a chair with the ButtKicker running, you'd swear that the bass is loud enough to earn you a visit from the local bylaw enforcement officer. But if you stand up, the bass goes away - and for anyone standing nearby, there's no sound at all beyond the faint buzzing of your chair (if there are any loose/vibrating parts), and whatever treble is coming over your regular speakers. If you have headphones on, the ButtKicker is just a low background buzz for others in the room.

The trick is that the ButtKicker sends low-frequency vibrations through the chair and fools your body into thinking it is "hearing" deep bass.

The gadget has two main parts. The first is a metal vibration unit about the size of a flattened tennis ball, connected to a heavy steel quick-release clamp. The clamp goes around the centre post of a desk chair. This is the only type of chair it works with — the type with a base on wheels and a centre post supporting the seat (the company makes more expensive versions for home theatre seats and couches). The clamp is adjustable, and it fit both a modern desk chair and an antique oak office swivel chair I tried it with (the solid oak chair gave the best vibration-feedback, I'm assuming because it had no upholstery padding my hindquarters ... although the metal fittings on the old oak chair did rattle a bit). The quick-release lets you unsnap the vibration unit and put it away when you're not using it, which is handy, but it's small enough that you could leave it attached all the time if you prefer.

The second part is a control box about the size of a large car audio amplifier - it's darned heavy, too. It can sit flat, or on its side in a pair of supports (although they slip off easily if you move the control unit around, which is annoying).

The control unit's face has a "volume" dial for the strength of the vibrations, and a crossover dial to select the frequency of the vibrations that the ButtKicker responds to (just as you would on an audio subwoofer). There are also high- and low-frequency crossover cuttoff switches to tailor the sound for games, music and movies.

Installation is a breeze, and there's a clearly-illustrated walkthrough poster as part of the manual. You plug the included Y adapter into your sound card's audio-out port, plug your speakers into one end of the Y and the ButtKicker patch cable into the other. Clamp the vibration unit to your chair, then plug a long and durable cable that trails out of it into the control box. Lastly, plug in the power cable, hit the on-switch, and you're good to go.

The package comes with a set of Velcro ties to secure the vibration unit's cable to one of the wheeled legs of your chair so that you're not constantly running over it. There's also an elasticized strain-relief mechanism to allow for the chair being spun around a bit throughout the day, preventing damage to the cable. Still, the main drawback of the ButtKicker is the heavy-gauge cable that snakes around the wheels of your chair.

Inconveniences aside, the ButtKicker Gamer was great for late-night gaming sessions, the ones that usually bring my wife storming downstairs in a fury when she's trying to sleep and I'm immersed in a heated firefight on-screen. You can use your speakers just for treble and midrange, and the ButtKicker fills in explosive bass. The only time I was playing late and received a visit from my bleary-eyed better half was one night when I was wearing headlphones and didn't realize the clamp had worked loose, causing the ButtKicker to buzz loudly against the chair post.

Yes, it works great with headphones, too. You can slip on a headset and the ButtKicker will make you think you're listening to a subwoofer powerful enough to rattle pictures on the wall, but all that's vibrating is your chair and, well, your butt.

All is not perfect, though.

First of all, despite statements to the contrary in the company's marketing material, it's not that great for music. By the time the ButtKicker received the music feed, generated vibrations based on the low frequencies of the beat, sent them through the chair and my body could sense them, the vibrations were a split-second behind the music. It wasn't much, but it was enough to be noticeable and vaguely annoying. This didn't happen in games, though, as gunfire, explosions and vehicle noise aren't rhythmic and tied directly to other sounds the way a beat in a song is.

Second, the vibration levels needs constant tweaking. There's a fine balance between good vibrations that make a game feel more realistic, and bad vibrations that start to make things in the chair resonate nastily or even cause a kind of death-rattle feedback in the ButtKicker generator itself. The unit is strong enough to create anything from a mild vibration to a rather astonishing kick through the chair, but the magnetic piston is also strong enough to damage itself and make a disconcerting racket if it overloads - something like the banging-on-a-tin-pan noise you hear when a car's anti-lock brakes kick in. To compensate for the regular changes in the type of in-game action, the vehicle I was in, and the background soundtrack, I was constantly having to tinker with the crossover frequency setting and the ButtKicker's equivalent of "volume" for the strength of the vibrations.

For example, the level necessary to get a realistic rumble from a jeep engine in Battlefield 2 was totally overpowering when jumping into a helicopter in the same game — the thrumming of the rotors set the whole chair vibrating loudly and uncomfortably, and the ButtKicker unit would rattle until I turned it down. A huge improvement would be a more reliable cutoff control that prevents the ButtKicker from overloading itself - the built-in limiter switch does a poor job in this respect, because it trims off too much of the vibration in many cases and that discourages you from wanting to use it.

This brings up another problem. There's no remote — all the controls are on the front of the heavy control box, so the box has to be within easy reach of your seat. It's too big for most desktops, though, so you'll probably leave it down beside your chair, which is a pain in the … butt. A better design would have been to put the controls on the vibration unit that's clamped to the chair, or on a small wired remote that could be placed on the desktop, in order to give you more freedom in terms of placing the main control/transformer box.

And why, why, why do manufacturers continue to put the power switch on the back of their gear? Putting the on/off button on the face of the unit along with the other controls would make placement a heck of a lot easier, especially given the ButtKicker's bulk.

The vibration unit also kicks out a lot of heat. After as little as a quarter of an hour of heavy firefights and other intense butt-kicking action, the vibration unit gets too hot to touch. This usually isn't a big concern, since your body doesn't come into contact with it directly. But in a couple of gaming sessions that lasted several hours, the unit's automatic thermal overload protection shut it down for a few minutes to allow the system to cool. (Which is where I realized how much realism the ButtKicker adds to the game, because I really missed it until it came back on...)

The only other difficulty I has was with the clamp. It has a knob that turns to tighten it and keep the vibration unit secured to the chair's centre post. But of course it's constantly vibrating, and the company didn't build in an effective shock-absorber for the screw, so I'd have to reach down and tighten the clamp after each hour or so of use. Not a big deal, but a simple shock washer in the clamping mechanism would have worked wonders.

Given all these design issues and inconveniences, why bother with it? Well, while the ButtKicker Gamer isn't a must-have for music, when properly adjusted it's phenomenal for games. Firing a gun, you can actually feel the recoil shudder through your body as well as hear the shots. I'm not kidding. The vibrations are strongest through the lower part of the body, since that's what's in closest contact with the chair, but larger concussions could be felt inside my chest to some extent.

Explosions create a thud that shakes the chair, giving the impression of a nearby, real-life concussion. Flying a helicopter in Battlefield 2, the chair shook and vibrated to match the engine and rotor noise, giving a level of realism that you have to feel to really appreciate. Same thing goes for flying jets in the game — the afterburner roar goes right through your body, without disturbing the rest of your household.

This gadget is probably a little much for the average gamer, both from a cost point of view and due to the inconvenience of having to connect it to the chair and regularly tweak its output levels. But it's tailor made for those hard-core gamers who crave the extra sensation of realism delivered by force-feedback-type controllers, and who don't mind adjusting settings throughout the game to maintain that realism. If you've tried force-feedback joysticks and gamepads and like them, this takes the experience up to the next level.

So if you can foot the bill and you're willing to fool with the vibration level controls for the best effect, the ButtKicker Gamer delivers the most bang for your butt — er, buck — when it comes to making the gaming experience more realistic and immersive. I'll wager that you're not going to find many of these in garage sales in the years to come - the ButtKicker is a keeper for hard-core players.