I’ve operated on a couple of layouts which had locomotive sound systems. Their adequacy seemed quite deficient. Not being very knowledgeable on this subject, I was wondering whether it was worthwhile at this time to invest in the hardware and installation of sound on my locomotives. How much farther do we need to come, particularly considering the following?
1. Realistic sounds, particularly locomotive and engine type.
2. Synchronization of exhaust to driver rotation, especially for three and four cylindered locomotives.
3. Blower (increasing smoke stack draft, particularly when loco is at a standstill).
4. Blow-down (removing impurities from the boiler).
5. Differentiation between exhaust/engine-effort sounds and speed (like in drifting down hill versus pounding up a grade, “cruising” or accelerating, etc.) This issue is particularly bothersome to me.
6. Air hose disconnect.
7. Squealing brakes.
8. Electrical generator.
9. Dynamic brakes.
10. Different bells, whistles, and horns.
11. Air compressors.
12. Etc.
What manufacturer’s sound chips comes closest to the “ideal,” and what remains to be done?
It depends on the recording, the decoder, and its installation, of course, but my experience is that the disconnect is about a realistic as it gets, followed by the chuff (at least on my K4s, which can be adjusted electronically to a very close synchro across speeds), and then hiss, followed by horn, then flang squeel and brake. The air pumps are the least, by a wide margin. Those who have stood 20 feet from a Westinghouse Cross Compound doing its slow “thooomb, thud…thooomb, thud” will understand me.
The way i understand it at least, we can get good quality sounds onto the decoder, but getting them out of the loco is the tricky part. The tiny speakers we put in engines just cant produce the bass of a real locomotive. Decoder technology will keep improving of course, but the big thing that needs help is the speakers.
True - you can’t fight physics. In order to get a good deep, sonorious bass sound, you have to be able to move a lot of air; something small speakers are woefully unable to do… However, the sounds you CAN get from those small speakers is still pretty amazing.
**__ We might never get there as there are probably not any recordings of many locomotive types. Also see the last comment under etc. below.
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We have had this for many years(decades). Even the old PFM was syncronizable. It is only with some of the recent DCC sound systems that this was “lost” and replace with “voltage”. Soundraxx have always made decoders that have this feature. The hard part is hooking it up, which many neglect to do.**__
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Once again, we have had this since the PFM and PBL sound systems. Only some recent DCC systems “lost” this feature. With the legal issues around “back emf” this should become common place on all future DCC systems as well.**__
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In all my years of train watching. This is one sound I have never noticed unless I was specifically listening for it. In other words - who cares.**__
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In my opinion this is WAY OVER done in the modern DCC systems. Seldom do I hear brake squeal when watching real trains. I consider it a “toy” feature and it doesn’t add anything**__
The ten points are covered well. I still have the PFM sound with the three tape inputs and it can do marvelous things, but I don’t use it any longer.
And last of all, nothing makes sound like large speakers. It is not possible in HO to make the low deep sounds correctly, but who knows in the future. Maybe Bose will help us.
What the real problem is, is that we are standing a lot further away from the scale model (in scale feet) than we do when hearing the real thing standing 20 real feet away.
So the sound, no matter how good they are will never match the real thing unless we are standing the same scale distance from the scale engine.
And I don’t think that will ever be possible.
If you are up on a hill and looking down at a real engine from 100 or 200 feet away the sounds won’t be much better than they are now when you are standing only 3 feet away from a scale engine. The distance will lose a lot of very small sounds (air pumps, hissing, etc.) yet we expect to hear that and we are a scale 100 feet away (a real 2 to 3 feet away when we are listening to the model vs. the real thing.
As far as bass goes–the best idea would probably be to use an amplifier and a subwoofer. Cost for a small amp and sub would probably be about $1000, not sure how you would link it to a sound system but heavy bass tones and subsonics are not particularly “directional” so you could put a single installation in any but the biggest of train rooms and have nice bass effects throughout the room. Neighbors might complain if you put such a system in an apartment, however…
Unfortunately, sound is one of those things that does not scale well. Add it to the list of things where the line of “good enough” is somewhere below the line of “faithfully represented.” I’m not casting asparagus [%-)] at the work and results of the current sound manufacturers, but just as we accept 20 - 45-degree curvatures as acceptable we probably need to come to grips with a similar distortion (or selective compression) in sound.
MARK: How much are YOU willing to pay for (your) ‘ideal’ sound systems?
The best ones out were the PBL ($900), Throttle Up ($400X2), and PFM ($600?) - and were Analogue Sound, and price didn’t include speakers. Unfortunately all manufacturers have to sell product to survive, and all the above are no longer made, although two of the three manufacturers - PBL & Thottle Up(div. Soundtrax) - are still in business.
GENERAL: Perception of sound.
Limitations are 1.SPEAKER SIZE 2.PHYSICS of transporting energy to our brain. 3 COST. Simply put: a micro-diaphram (speaker) cannot fill your room with sound any more than a micro-bulb can light up your garage. Want proof? Feed the 1 watt of sound output into a set of headphones sometime.The sound will be ‘front row’. No matter the quailty of the software, Bass requires pumping air. Audiophiles bought 18" speakers that weighed 10 or more lbs. to reach the bottom end of a Pipe Organ. Good ‘resonating’ sub-woofers starts at $500 $600. The practicalities of the market are too few of us are willing to spend that kind of money for mini trains running on an home built layout - to satisfy our imaginations.
The sound in my BLI switcher is great and I am extremly pleased with it. It has all the squeals, compressors, fans, throttle up and down, bell horn sounds and it sounds really good. The other sound I have is a Digitrax system in my AC4400CW. There is a lot to be desired there. The horn sounds great the bell is good the blowers, breaks and let off are great and disconnect and connect are great. the only thing I don’t like is when it’s idling sitting still it sound great and goes through the paces just great but when it is set in motion the sound of the engine is so loud that it over powers everything else and you can’t turn it down without turning all the sound down. The Sound they have recorded isn’t a reall working sound for the running sound. It’s like they recorded an engine at a very high idle. there is no turbo whistle or power I guess in the sound it’s just loud like reving your car up and recording it. I think my next custom Job in my SD38-2 I am going to try the Tsunami decoder and a couple of speakers. I have heard the new Atlas engines and they sound pretty good but I have not run them at all. I think once the quality of the recording gets up to speed and they figure out how to get more speakers in a smaller area then the sounds will improve.
Many people keep bringing this up and with todays systems this will not work. It is like an urban legend that won’t die. Once again the old PFM and PBL systems had a special circuit just for this purpose, but today’s sound processors do not even produce a signal in the range that a sub-woofer will respond to. So if a sub-woofer were hooked up to a DCC sound processor (through an amplifier of any size), it would just sit there silently.
Being pretty much unfamiliar with DCC in general, and not being much of an audiophile either, I was unaware of that, but it is good to know–I would imagine that the serious audiophile who did have the wherewithal to hack such a sound system might be able to add suitable low bass frequencies. I know at least one musically-oriented model railroader made a project of adding a really good stereo system with nightclub-quality subs to a model railroad so he could produce deep thrumming bass sounds to match locomotive noises, but the exact details escape me…not sure if it was in conjunction with a DCC sound system or some sort of homebrew.
to me (and maybe only to me) , the question is
“is it more fun to run trains with today’s DCC sound decoders , or to run them silently ?”
i have to say with !
would it be even more fun to run trains with sound systems using the specs Mark wishes for ? you bet , but until somebody can deliver that system i’ll be happy with my tsunamis
The day we get true, prototypical sound it will drive me right out of my basement. Or, I will develop serious hearing problems. Or, I will need ear plugs and not hear much at all. And, to me, when I watch and hear the real thing, it’s not just the sound but the billowing smoke and steam that make it exciting. So now if we get the “real thing” I’m going to need a $5000 smoke and steam evacuation system for my basement!! I will also probably develop some serious lung problems.
Seriously, to me, running a model railroad requires a creative imagination, whether running sound or not. When running silently I can imagine the sound. When running sound I can imagine the real thing. I love and enjoy the sound I have now. It adds a lot for me.
I appreciate the manufacturers progress to date, and know that great advancements are yet to come. The creative genius in a free, open market society is amazing.
Jerry
P.S. Try running several sound engines all at once on a typical home layout and it will drive you nuts. You gotta turn some of them off. Imagine what it would be like if they were truly realistic.
I’m in my early 40s and I’m not joking when I state that way back in the late 1970s I used to wish that HO diesel locomotives could “sound just like the real thing”. The closest we had was hearing Athearn Blue Box units “growl” when running.
I had a stereo “boom box” back then. Sometimes I would take it out to the SCL mainline and record “the action”. (I wish I had done it more often)
25 years later my dream has come true! In HO I’m hearing EMD 567 baritone chants, EMD 645 turbocharged whines, ALCO “Diddy-Wumps”, GE “Chug-chug-chugs”, as well as Nathan, Leslie, and Wabco air horns.
I can’t complain! It’s super! Yes, it would be nice to hear the “ultra-low” sounds that an SD45 or U-boat produced at throttle up, but to those of us that want to relive those memories of just a couple of decades ago while railfanning…It’s sweet.