Oh, I forgot to ask, David B, how much is Digitrax paying you to slam MRC?
Man your as thick as a brick, I can see this post is going to get locked so let me speak my piece. Not defending David B, as he of all people here is more then capable of firing back enough salvo’s to sink a battle ship of comments but do you even bother to read his entire post and not just skim over the highlights? He like myself have no qualms regarding MRC’s command stations aka DCC system but rather with their obviously substandard decoders. Do us all a favor and search the archives of posts and see how many negative comments are posted about Digitrax, NCE, TCS,Lenze or another other dcc decoder on the market. I will venture to say little or none. The reason why MRC is such an easy target for negative feedback and justifiably so is that they make complete and utter garbage. Maybe the fact that you have only 33 or shall I say now 35 or 36 posts it’s reflective in the fact that either you haven’t been here that long nor have you bothered to read many of the posts regarding MRC decoders. It’s a simple fact that if so many people who have no affiliation with each other all come up with the same conclusion that there has to be a strong foundation to support their argument. If you READ the post you will see that it’s not bashing but rather people voicing their angry opinion for getting ripped off by a company who makes, obviously far fetched and ridiculous claims. If you don’t want to believe the members of this board and live in ignorant bliss thinking MRC is the be all to end all when it comes to DCC system of choice then be happy in your blindness. If you really want to find out form people who really know check out some of the more well accomplished model railroad builders or large clubs in the country and see what they run. Here in NJ we have “The Model Railroad Club” of Union NJ one of the largest club layouts in the country they run Digitrax, Ken McCorry’s Conrail layout possibly one of the largest home layouts in the country, Ken runs NCE Howard Zane, and Tony Koester both run NCE and
Ken runs NCE, not MRC. I don’t think Tony or Howard run MRC either.
–Randy
This whole post was supposed to be about the Prodigy Squared system. So why is it that you and David B keep slamming people because you don’t like MRC decoders? Maybe YOU should READ a post before shooting off your mouth! I don’t care how many posts you or anyone else has. Many of the posts from David B can be summed up “I HATE MRC”. If you would read MY posts you would see that I have never said anything either way about MRC. My issue is the fact that anytime someone has a different OPINION than you or David B they get slammed. Believe me, we all know how you feel about MRC by now!!!
All that from someone who was the proud owner of a Bachman EZ Command no later than March 24 2010.
I’m not a DCC user yet, so I have no axe to grind - other than some disappointment with MRC’s proprietary attitude to their high end DC products. As an electrical engineer, these sorts of things interest me, so I have investigated DCC systems both on line and at my LHS.
Cleo, you started off with how you love your PA2 system, claiming it was reliable and otherwise great. How do you know it’s reliable? From a statistic of one? Based on reports in various forums (the best measure of reliability stats I have so far), I would say PA2 is indeed on a par with the other systems for reliability. There are some reported failures, but the numbers seem to be reasonable for any of the major systems.
Any failure is a severe disappointment to the individual making a significant purchase. From the corporate perspective, it is often considered “good enough” to have a percentage rate failure about the same as your competitors. That may be OK when you are selling millions of an electronic widget, but it doesn’t work so well when you are selling well under 10K DCC units to guys who will vent their unhappiness to other model railroaders. Then, how the irate customer is handled is everything, much more powerful than advertising. Ask BLI, Blackstone, and Bachmann how they know this. And even they have lost customers and gotten bad word of mouth when they failed to make the customer with the defective locomotive happy.
But you have taken the thin-skinned approach to any criticism of MRC. And I didn’t know you were entitled to control a thread just because you made the 1st pos
Well Cleo, as you can see, passions run high on this subject and if nothing else you can see the magnitude of the PR problem that MRC faces.
MRC, one of the most respected names in the industry just a few short years ago, through miss-step after miss-step, horrendous quality control and some in-your-face advertising has reached the point where the company is reviled by many modellers. There are many now who simply don’t take the company seriously and most certainly don’t consider them a leader in DCC.
Santa Fe all the way’s attempt to have a users meeting was of course well intended, but feelings run high. There is a sense of utter incredulity that MRC would shun the use of the most respected and utilized computer application for DCC programming and control. It smacks of utter arrogance again on the part of the company and further fans the flames of anti-MRC sentiment.
Do a search on the forum, you will be very hard pressed to find any genuine criticism of the Prodigy Sq command station. Most freely acknowledge the fact that it is an easy to use, apparently reliable, well priced system, backed by little in the way of web resource and improving telephone support. But you can’t easily separate the product from the company. This thread was an attempt to discuss the system in isolation without any of the other factors that determine reputation. As you can see, this is a very hard thing to do.
Randy, I humbly stand corrected I knew that but I guess the evils of MRC took over my fat fingers note my corrected statement
Cleo3,
I have great respect for you for your service in Viet Nam. Thanks to you and many others for their service then and now.
I think some on this thread have confused you with the original poster of this thread. But, nevertheless, the OP asked for comments from “happy” PA2 users. It’s unfortunate that some had to ignore that request and start the negativism. I can understand why this may have ticked you off, as it did with me, but sometimes there are smoother ways to handle such situations, especially in a public forum.
Anyway, I hope that we can get back to the original purpose of this thread.