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Sitting pretty - the Fresh Ear Chair
Getting your butt kicked has never been so much fun.
By Max Christoffersen
October 2000
Fresh Ear Seat Two home theatre seat. $2195 plus freight.
Calling all home theatre lounge lizards - I've found the final piece of the puzzle.
Ok so you've got your big screen, DD/DTS audio and a DVD player. But
something is missing... you know the feeling?
Well I've been there and done that and found that the 'something missing'
is tactile bass. The bass you feel and don't just hear.
Bass engines (or tactile transducers) are a the hot product right now
- the shakers work on the concept that low bass is mostly felt and not
heard and when they are fed a low bass signal they shake whatever they
are bolted to. The enhancement of low end bass is very realistic and takes
the home theatre experience to a new level of involvement (for a fuller
description see Clark Synthesis reviewed elsewhere).
You can shake the floors with these units by screwing them into floor
joists. But another way is to bolt them to your seating. And if you can
integrate the transducers into your HT furniture with a bit of style -
even better!
You can always find recliners and try to modify them but how to get into
the nooks and crannies without ruining them? The basic problem is that
no-one has been making dedicated HT furniture in NZ that is both comfortable
and able to rock and roll with the bottom end bass when needed.
Until now.
A chance conversation lead me to a Dunedin based company who was thinking the same thing I was. How to build a quality piece of home theatre furniture that would be a great base for tactile bottom end, but be comfortable and usable (and appeal to the women of the house).
Enter Peter Tipa from Good Hi-Fi. Along with a furniture building partner,
they had been making recliner HT chairs using the Aura bass shakers and
were pleased with the blend of quality furniture design and good tactile
response. A few suggestions from me and we had the first prototype two
seater (the Fresh Ear Seat Two) on its way north for a demo.
And what more can I say? The women of the house liked it. (And that is
a first for anything HT!) And me - well I LOVE it. It is simply the final
touch to any HT system - and not just for the way it looks and feels -
but for the way it works.
Make no mistake this isn't just a quality piece of furniture - this is a quality piece of audio too. The seat has been purpose built to accommodate all of the current bass shaker units including Aura, Aura Pro, Clark Synthesis and The Buttkicker.
Access to the rear of the seat has been provided by a screw off panel allowing an Aura shaker to be bolted to the rear frame while underneath another dedicated space is allocated for another Aura. A crossmember beam stretching the width of the two seater will house the Clark Synthesis.
Finally a steel plate is attached to the centre of the frame allowing the entire couch to be bolted hard and fast to a sub-platform which will transfer the bass weight and impact of the big Buttkicker unit.
But all of this would be purely cosmetic if it wasn't for the rigid frame that is a feature of the build quality of the couch. To makes things rock and roll you must have a robust and solid seat 'chassis' capable of transferring vibrations (sitting on a bare 4x2 would be the ideal!) when those big bass heavy scenes (like Shuttle launches or explosions) call for it.
The obvious trade-off being that this is a couch and it must be soft and comfortable. Well the designers have pulled it off by building a chair with the best of both worlds. It is a comfortable piece of furniture but a great transducer as well. And that is no mean feat - but evidence of the sound engineering that has gone into the design and a thorough understanding of what the committed tactile-bass enthusiast is seeking. The chair really has to move when pushed but remain comfortable as well. And it does both.
Cosmetically,
the finish is a mix of velour and vinyl and the recliner mechanism is
solid and heavy. Underneath you can see the craftsmanship that has gone
into the chair. Everything is heavy duty glued and screwed with galvanised
bolts for the load bearing places and a ton of foam and staples making
the finish utterly immaculate.
Add in the stainless steel drink holders in the recliner arms and you
have a HT seat designed by HT fans for HT fans.
What more can I say? This really is a required piece of the HT experience
- and if you don't have one you don't have the real thing. Tactile bass
is the future of HT and doing it in style is that much better. (Try the
shuttle launch scene in Armageddon or T2 skewered scenes
or Chapters 7 and 9 from Species and you will never choose to go
without a bass shaker in the system again).
And when you consider that similar recliner only HT chairs in the US
retail at over $4000 the chair is a bargain at $2195 plus delivery in
the custom colours of your choice.
So sit back, recline a little and feel the earth move - it's a experience you won't soon forget. And I'm betting that if you experience it once you won't want to give it back.
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