Nice work ViciousXUSMC, I look forward to watching your project unfold.
On thing that is of vital importance is controlling the transducer volume so you don't overdrive and shred it.
I had no resources to go the homemade route so I caved and got a Butt Kicker (cashed in a birthday). The addition is amazing, I would not game without Surround and the transducer now. So I thought I would throw my 2 cents in here with regards to my audio setup in case it helps anyone out (who can be bothered reading my wall of text).
I have always gamed with headphones as I find the audio from the mostly FPS I play to be obnoxious played through speakers and my wife sits about 3 feet away on her pc, so why ruin a good thing : )
My setup is : Logitech G35 7 channel headphones that run off their own USB plug as a separate audio device and mid priced Logitech 5 channel speaker setup that is primarily used for music. The beauty of the headphones on their own audio device is I set the G35's as the primary sound device and use Foobar
http://www.foobar2000.org/ to play music over the speakers independently as Foobar allows you to select which output device to use and up-mixes to quad stereo with a very small system footprint.
So all game and system sounds come through the headphones. Now with a traditional transducer setup you tap off the sub channel or wire the amp in before the speakers and use the hi/low cut off that comes with the amp to remove the high end only leaving the bass. This only works when you use the desktop speakers obviously and I found the cut off to be not very accurate and some racing games have a more mid sound for their engine noises (Dirt 3 being a prime example, ill get back to that later).
I had an old pair of laptop headphones that came with their own USB dongle audio card, you can pick up a cheap one for less then $20 I see on ebay (
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/5-1CH-3D-USB-2-0-Audio-Sound-Card-Adapter-Headphone-MIC-For-Win7-64Bit-/221194577564?pt=AU_Components&hash=item338039669c), so this gives me an independent audio channel to drive the transducer.
So to use the transducer USB audio device I need a virtual way of splitting the primary channel and driving the transducer from its own audio device. This is a achieved with Virtual Audio Cable
http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm, this allows me to create a virtual Line in / Line out. There is a demo avail that has a voice talking every couple of seconds but it will let you test it to see if it will work with your system. It is also an awesome way to record any audio in the same way you used to be able to "Record what you hear" with the old soundblaster card software.
So I now have a Virtual audio cable (Line 1) set as my Primary audio device, to get audio to my headphones I fire up the Audio Repeater (MME) that comes with VAC, set the wave in as the Line 1 and the Wave out as the G35's, set the Total buffer to 70, the buffers to 16 (you will need to try different values to remove Over and Underflows while removing noticeably audio latency on your system.
Now I want to control the frequency range being sent to the transducer, so I found a free VST plugin application : Cantabile Lite
http://www.cantabilesoftware.com/lite/. Choose the Line 1 as the input and the transducer usb audio as the output.
I googled for free VST's and found a Crossover, a Graphic EQ and a High pass and Low pass filter (there are many other types of VST that you can use, these just worked for me). After several hours fiddling with the stack I have nearly completely removed the high / mid and boosted the mid / low. I actually recorded some game noise and used Foobar to play the mp3 through Line 1 giving me the ability to tune the setup without having to be in game.
As mentioned before with Dirt 3 the engine noises are quite high pitched and while using Cantabile to pitch the game noise down helped it was by no means ideal. I then discovered the Sim underground, X-Sim
http://www.x-sim.de/forum/portal.php. The have a free sim application that can drive audio transducers and it was through that that I discovered that a few of the Codemasters driving games have a telemetry server built in.
I tried using the X-Sim software, but it was very complex and relied on user created content that was not overly accurate and I gave up in the end. This led me to Sim Commander
http://simxperience.com/Products/Software/SimCommander3.aspx, its not cheap but it is very easy to use and supports most of the current racing sims
http://simxperience.com/Products/Software/SimCommander3/SimCommanderSupportedSimulationGames.aspx. One thing to note specifically with Dirt 3, Code masters broke the telemetry server with the last update so you need to run D3 on the second to last patch for the telem server to work. Once it is working though its brilliant as you don't get the game music, announcer etc triggering the transducer, only the engine and impacts.
Stoked for you guys, I guarantee you wont go back once you have played anything with a transducer in the mix !
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