I’ll probably be sorry I started this topic but my curiosity finally got the best of me.
I’m a long time model railroader, very long time. Early on I as a young teen built everything, including my power supplies. 16 volt high current transformer, Selenium rectifier and wire wound potentiometer for speed control. I hand laid all of my track and built my turnouts on a shelf in my bedroom.
When I was old enough to earn some money I bought a MRC power pack, I was in heaven. As time went on I grew into a career job and started my first layout. As the years passed I enhanced my model railroad and stayed with MRC power packs. I stayed with MRC through the years because I never had a single problem with them.
Finally in the 2000s I wanted to add sound to my locomotives so I made the decision to cut over to DCC. Again because I had never experienced any kind of problem with MRC Product for over 50 years I chose to go with MRC Prodigy Advance Squared DCC. I have used it for what I would say heavy duty model railroading (multiple Cab Forwards pulling 3½% grades) for close to 10 years without a single problem. I have decoders from several manufacturers and all work very good, again not one single problem.
After all of that my question is why does MR
MRC…not MDC (that’s a whole other company. …Model Die Casting)…DCC systems are fine. They finally allowed JRMI into their system, so they are on par with every other system out there in terms of connectivity. However, their line of over-hyped, constantly failing decoders are what causes the flak. They are not worth the purchase, no matter how good a deal you get…even free. There are much better, more reliable options for decoders.
The other thing is their history - they have had 4 or 5 generations of DCC systems, each one not in any way compatible with the previous one, so if you upgraded, the pld one was pretty much useless. The current lineup, they finally learned, and you can start with a Prodigy Express and get to the Prodigy Wireless without throwing anything out. Their previous policy of not allow JMRI to work with their system also generated a lot of flack, for good reason. Every other well known system out there worked with it. Looks like MRC saw the error of their ways and has since reversed that position and now JMRI is supported.
Contrast to the two most popular (in the US anyway), NCE and Digitrax - they have always been expandable, old stuff from the beginning days of DCC will still work with today’s systems.
Their decoders, as David said, have always been not worth the trouble. Some of the features they loudly tout, like having 16 horns selectable by a CV, are wonderful - except the documentation doesn’t tell you what horn you get for a given value of the CV, and their tech support flat out stated when I called that they don’t record that information. So, you designed a complex piece of electronics and didn’t document it?
The other turn off for people about MRC is their over the top advertising. No, no one expects a company to take out ads theat say “Hey, our product is GOOD ENOUGH!” but MRC claims they are the best and first in a lot of things with no evidence backing that up, and the reasons they give in the ads aren;t necessarily accurate or even a positive point about the product. But this is nothing new, they had ads like that back when the Goolden Throttlepack 501 was the latest and greatest.
Then there are the little things they negelct to mention, like if you build a big enough system, you will need powered fascia plates to plug throttles in to, and MRC does have them - they are double the cost of similar NCE and Digitrax produc
Thanks for the good input Guys!
I’m not what you could call a DCC model railroader. I went the DCC route for sound, I just go bananas over my Cab Forwards with the Soundtraxx decoders. My first two decoders were MRC Brilliance Steam sound and I was very happy with them until I heard the SP Cab Forward Sountraxx some eight years later. I moved the MRC decoders to a pair of kitbashed Y6Bs that resemble an SP MC-2. I swap the decoders around to various locomotives for variety. I’m not a model railroad operations type guy and couldn’t care less about that, no offence to anyone, that’s just not my thing.
I have two spare SP oil tenders that have Soundtraxx decoders that I swap out between my 12 Rivarossi Cab Forwards and my three Kitbashed Rivarossi Cab Forwards to SP AC-9s, that way I don’t have to open the tenders to swap the decoders. I still run a lot of the time on standard DC.
I kitbashed several diesels into specialty locomotives and went with Digitrax for their function outputs, that is something my MRC decoders are lacking in. With the super easy to install and wire DH-126 I control cameras, camera lighting, snow blower rotor, an operating crane plus a bunch of other goodies.