Tactile Audio System 1

Tactile Sound

Introduction
Tactile sound is a very addictive option for a fixed base flight simulator. A Tactile sound system applies low frequency vibrations to the cockpit and gives an additional 'real flight' feeling to the pilot. You can feel the wheels bouncing along the runway, the movement of the flaps, the extended speedbrakes, the gear brakes, gear up and down, steering sounds, and some more.

Bass Shaker
In my setup I have one bass shaker mounted below each seat and two additional ones on the cockpit platform. The bass shakers are driven by a 70W mono amplifier. For this I have connected the bass shakers in two branches with 2 bass shakers connected in series each. The two branches are connected in parallel. With this trick I came up to a total resistance of 4 ohm, which perfectly fits to the output resistance of the amplifier.

Bass shaker mounted beneath the captain's seat. The blue light gives the flight deck
a very nice cold atmosphere

Sound Mixer
The amplifier is driven by a mixture of low frequency sounds and the some engine noise from the sound card of the FS computer. For low frequency sounds I have the following selected:

Gear up / down
Speed brakes extended
Steering sound (scrubbing)
Flaps in transition
Brake
Run way bump

In order to trigger sounds events depending on the various flight situations I use pmSounds from Project Magenda. I have installed several instances of pmSounds on three of my flight deck computers. The pmSounds instance running on the PM PFD ND computer drives the bass shakers with the above listed sounds.

The Monacor MMX-8 Miniatur-Universal-Audio-Mischer is used to level the low frequency sounds with the FS9 sound output. The resulting audio signal is fed to the tactile sound amplifier.

I have slightly enhanced the low frequency parts of the engine sound with the audio equalizer of the FS Server. This improves the tactile feeling of the running engines.

Please note that for the trigger of the steering sound (scrubbing) the program TSR Autobrake PRO B737 from Thomas Richter is needed. Check at simMarket if you want to purchase the program. For the sound a Google search might be helpful.