Trainsounds vs. Railsounds?

[Anonymous]

What is the difference between the two? I was surprized that the new Lionel 0-8-0s will have Trainsounds instead of the 2005 released in Railsounds 5.0.

Smokebox

[Anonymous]

Trainsounds is the name for the simplified version of RailSounds. Trainsounds uses conventional triggers like bell and horn/whistle buttons instead of TMC commands to access more complicated sound sets.

[wrmcclellan]

smokebox - it is a significant difference.

Trainsounds is for conventional control and as chuckn states - a limited sound set (sometimes just whistle and bell sounds and can only be activated by the whislte and bell controls). The new Trainsounds has not been defined in the new catalog, so it is unclear if chuffing sounds are included or not.

Railsounds is coupled with TMCC in order to get the full feature set of sounds (i.e.. specific crew talk by pushing an AUX button, labored chuffing and drifting chuffing based on TMCC speed control increment or decrement, etc.).

The other difference is price. The 080s available with conventional control and Trainsounds are $420 list and the last release of the 080 with TMCC and RS5 were $650. So now one can get a scale and very detailed 080 for $230 less than the original. Pretty significant. This is the first time Lionel has offered the highly detailed scale locos without requirng TMCC (which is something I think a lot of folks who run conventional only have asked for).

Regards,
Roy

[Anonymous]

You do get engine sounds (diesel prime mover or chuffing for steam), BUT, some of the sounds cut out when others are playing. There is a simplified set of crew talk/towercom. I believe these cut out the engine sounds during play back. Whistle/horn are more akin to the old "Signal Sounds" sets. These are nice digital recordings of a real whistle/horn but do not have the variety of playback that Railsounds has. RS whistle/horn recordings include snippets of sounds that are assembled on the fly by the sound controller so the whistle/horn doesn't always sound the same when you trigger it.

chuck