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Frank, Read the review of the MTH (decoder) in your industry review. Am curious about a few points.

1) It sounds like MTH is trying to develop a competing system to NMRA DCC. IMHO this is really a bad idea, because they are sole source (back to the days of systems that no longer exist)! 2) Smoke is a tinplate item and used very little in the DCC group. 3) What does this mean?

recommended DC power supplies< If the engines can run on NMRA DCC then this statement makes little sense.

4) This statement really shows when MTH's head is;

ability to operate on AC current< To my knowledge (except for a European manufacture) no HO scale equipment runs on AC!

Bottom line is that it seems MTH instead of joining the huge growing group of NMRA DCC that they are going to try and offer a competing type of digital control. Really a shame as my assessment is that it will be a huge flop. The way to go is to make a decoder compatible with NMRA DCC and it appears that they are going the opposite direction.

Jon, If this is the MTH plan I think you are dead on. You would think that the idea of proprietary systems especially with electronics would be viewed as a dead end in many situations. QSI appears to have embraced the DCC standard and will sell to any model manufacturer that ponies up. It won't matter if the MTH system is better if its not compliant. The only competition QSI should see will be from Sountraxx or someone new who will make their products compliant with the NMRA standards and available to both the modeler as well as the manufacturer. Bruce

There is another sound system and that's Phoenix. Reading the Phoenix manual (it's on site) will probably give you an idea of what MTH is thinking. That being the case I would then find their sound decoders very low level. Just one reason to start, you couldn't program them with any DCC systems!

Be interesting to see if MTH is going to attend the NMRA national in Seattle. I think I will email and ask them.

I'm wondering if anyone makes a SUSI module yet? The concept seems to be really good and I suspect other decoder manufactures will also add SUSI interfaces BUT the question remains who makes a SUSI module?

"Jon Miller" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

********snip************* Apparently the concept is a joint venture betveen Lenz and Dietz, another german company. their pages is only in german. From what I just went over quickly they are offering a couple of SUSI modules, the Micro XS and the X-clusive S. They have around 90 different locomotive sounds you can download for these, mostly European. For the US there's a "Big" diesel, "medium" diesel, shay, climax, mikado, Uintah Mallet and "American" steam. No details of what the sources are. The sizes are 60 x 30 x 15 mm for the X-clusive and 25 x 15 x 5 mm for the Micro XS. 1 inch equals 25 mm. Listprice for the X-clusive is 199 Euro, I would guess the "street price" in the US would be around $140, based on the Lenz pricing. To program the module and load sounds you'll need a programmer, costing 79 Euro, estimated US streetprice $66.

I can't find anything on a US distributor and a lot of the stuff in their pricelist is LGB, so apparently they are "downsizing" from largescale, like some of the US makers.

This is what I can make up for now, not sure if it really helps :-)

Kind regards

Tom Larsen Holte, Denmark Where the gasoline price is equal to US$ 1,50 a litre ~ a quart!

in the US would be around $140, based on the Lenz pricing.< This pricing seems a little stiff. I posted on another list and was discussing earlier about using an SD chip (used in cameras and). A 16M chip with the addition of a mixer and amp (separate module) should be all that's needed. I think the SD chips are serial and with a little creative programming could be made very price competitive (cheap). I was told these chips are used for music so speed shouldn't be a problem.