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How to Build a Rump-Shakin’ Riser – Part 1

// February 2nd, 2011 // construction

Well, so far, The Digital Pimp has shown you many tricks to make a home theater come together. But the journey is far from over, my friends. Now comes his biggest feat of daring: building a seating platform.

Not just any platform. I’m talking ’bout a rump-shakin’, name-takin’, portal-to-the-8th-Dimension-makin‘ Platform of Doom.

Time to roll up the sleeves and get serious, y’all. This will take several posts to sort out, so this is just the first in the series.

Planning & Design

Get your brain straight before you embark on a journey like this. It will save you blood, sweat, and tears before it’s all over. Planning makes all the difference, and this is no exception.

There were a few design considerations that shaped the design:

• Riser needs to be large enough to fit a row of 3 seats
• Riser should be high enough to ease viewing, but not so high it trips people to step up.
• Aisle space needed on both sides to ease entry/egress
• Power outlets required on the top and front for power recliners
• Vibration damping and bass resonance control critical
• Integrated rump-shakin’ system a must-have

Now, the last two points warrant some explanation. With any riser, you may run the risk of having bass frequencies from your subwoofer causing shaking or booming inside the cavity. The bigger it is, the great the risk of having bass overpower your room. Essentially, your riser turns into a big speaker, and the effect can overpower everything.

Taking it a step further, I wanted to install rump shakers, er, um, bass transducers for the nerds out there. Essentially it’s a speaker without the cone. All vibration, no sound pressure.

Now, I had been reading about various riser designs, and they all have some features to avoid the bass resonance issue. But I had a whacky idea to put the rump shakers right into the platform.

My design was inspired by the guys over at Audioholics, but with a little pimpin’, I turned it into a new level of awesome.

Instead of installing rump shakers under each seat as a lotta folks do, I decided build them into the platform. With holes in the front to provide some bass relief, the platform becomes a big subwoofer.

With this much bass in the platform, I also had to isolate the platform from the floor to be sure the sound had somewhere to go. Keeping my budget in line, hockey pucks saved the say.

Oh, did I mention I’ve never done this before?

Yeah. So? The Pimp walks without fear, cane in hand, tool box ready to strike.

With all these points in mind, I laid out the design, warmed up the PDV (Pimp Daddy Van for the uncool), and headed off to Home Depot for some serious shopping.

In Part 2, I’ll cover the parts list, and how we got started.

So, how do you think this will turn out? Stay tuned to find out!

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