Sound Survey

etc etc

You left off a few very important ones :

How many turn their volumes down to a level you would expect to hear from the prototype, at the distances we have in our various scales?

And: How many turn the sound down as their number of sound equipped locos increase?

If you include these two, put me down for all the time and yes to my two additions.

Steve Magee Newcastle NSW Aust

I understand from hearing from others that more than 1 or 2 sound equipped locos in an area can be annoying.

I currently don't have any sound equipped units to speak of, and I think cost is a factor, a engine equipped with sound is $ 60 to $100 more than the same unit without sound, and a sound decoder is more expensive than a regular decoder, look at the sound decoder in the latest issue of PMR (PMR = Popular Model Railroader) and note the price of $ 99.95, that's about 3 times the price of a standard DCC decoder.

Alan

A) Yes

Correcting the volume to resemble the prototype at distance helps a great deal. Having the volume at full tilt all the time would be very annoying.

No matter what the magazine's try to tell you, every sound system I have heard sucks.

How on earth can you get a full range if sounds from a one inch speaker?

Impossible!

Nobody will convince me that a 1 inch speaker gives the same sound as the combination 12 inch speaker (s) and a large sub-woofer does.

People who have sound equipped locos will now write and say how wrong I am. I guess they're satisfied with tinny sound, not me.

-- Cheers

Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

You don't BUT, it's good enough for many.

I personally am not impressed with much of the diesel sound. I like the rest, brake squeal, horn, bell, air ...

DUH!!

It gets tinny as you up the volume ... so don't do that *8^)

Paul

The LC (100 LC steam or diesel) group of Soundtraxx decoders can be had for around $36-$40!

As others have noted, you forgot one:

My answers:

Stevert

You can't...

I'd prefer a sound equipped layout over a sound equipped loco, and with the advent of location capabilties in todays DCC systems, I'd rather have several 6" or so speaker systems placed around the layout and have the sound follow the loco.

Alan

To some people, that still would be too expensive when they can get a standard decoder for $ 20 or less...

Alan

in article snipped-for-privacy@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com, Alan Gilchrist at snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote on 10/1/06 3:04 PM:

Just to confirm Roger T: physics says you are not getting any bass frequencies (below about 300HZ from a 1" speaker, regardless of the baffle: you just can't push enough air.

If once could send the output of a 12 bit or more sound decoder to the 1" (or so) on board speaker and to an external system, you could set the external up as a subwoofer with a low pass only filter set at about 100hz. You could (or should?) even us a mixer to combine the low frequencies from ALL of the running decoders.

Frequencies below about 100 Hz or so are omnidirectional (wavelength is a foot or so or longer) so using a single subwoofer placed under the layout would give the whole thing some body.

But you would still miss low midrange (100 to 500hz or so) with the 1" speaker. I don't think that would be a serious problem given that one would likely keep the individual loco volumes low except for show-off purposes.

The original questioner had a valid series of questions, and my answers are:

True. But, the only way to make it sound like the real thing is to have the real thing in you train room 8^). Keep in mind that these are miniatures and no matter how hard you try, it will not ever sound, or feel like the locomotive you are trying to emulate. Even 12" speaker won't do it complete justice. Close, but still not completely the same. Now if you could rig up a vibration system in the floor to go along with a humongous speaker system, and the neighbors won't complain, then you might have something to thrill the mind and quicken the heart.

NO

YES - primary use of sound is for shows.

Rarely. Just to verify the sound is set the way I want it. When checking out a new sound equipped loco. BUT, normally not.

I run them muted most of the time. I will turn on sound and use the horn to get the attention of various members who may have fallen asleep or have just forgotten to throw a switch or some such thing. Then it's immediately muted.

Paul

What do you do for sound on your layout?

"Mark Mathu"

I don't have sound and won't, until it sounds realistic. No matter what people say, sound systems in model locos sound too tinny and unrealistic and are, in my opinion, not worth the expense.

-- Cheers

Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

Not sure what scale you're talking about, but the whistle, bell and chuff on my roommate's O-scale Lionel 2-8-2 Mikados (6-18079 and 6-18080 from Lionel's 1999 Heritage Catalog) are, from a distance of 30 feet or so, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Just curious - are you also foregoing trees, spikes, water, rail joints, couplers, etc. etc. on your layout until they also are realistic?? :-) Geezer

The tender on an O scale loco is large enough to hold a large size speaker which can and does sound much better than one of those tiny one inchers you find in an HO engine.

One inch speakers don't whistle, they tweet....

Alan

Reasonable approximations of trees, spikes, rail joints, and couplers already exist. They are essentially static objects, so only a representation of the physical form is necessary, and that form does not change moment to moment.

However, water doesn't scale for the same reason sound doesn't... the characteristics and dynamic behavior of the molecules involved cannot be scaled. The form to be modeled changes many times a second in both cases. Unless and until there is a quantum breakthrough in speaker technology, sound from the small speakers possible in smaller scales _cannot_ produce an accurate frequency spectrum for trains. It's a simple physical impossibility. Ask any audio engineer about reproducing low frequency sound with a speaker the size of a quarter... or a dime. They'll laugh at you.

Physics Does Not Scale.