I just installed my first LokSound. It's a Micro V3.5 with a 5/8" x 1" speaker in an HO Athearn F3. However, it has the wrong sound since I was originally going to put it in another loco but the speaker wouldn't fit. The sound is an Alco 539 6 cyl. I will ask my LHS to reload the correct sound.
The LokSound cost was $110 compared to $62 for the Digitrax DH165 series plus Soundbug that I have been using. A cost difference of $44. So, is it worth it? I kind of want to say yes, but then that's a lot of money if you have lots of locos. However, I am really impressed with the sound. But for me, it's probably too late to change as I have already invested in a number of Digitrax/Soundbug combinations and don't think I want to spend that much to start over.
My hope is that Digitrax will eventually have a lot more sounds available so I can get the appropriate sound in each loco. Actually, I'm pretty happy with the Digitrax sound, but LokSound is definitely better. Following are some of my observations regarding my initial, first day experience with LokSound:
1. The Micro will fit in almost anything but the speaker sizes are larger (the sound chamber was thicker than on my other speakers) and that can be the critical element in making a fit.
2. The diesel sound is excellent and very loud. I like the way you can quickly adjust the sound level with a double press of F8.
3. The bell volume is okay but I would like the horn to be a little louder.
4. I'm pretty overwhelmed by the LokSound manuals and procedures. They seem quite different than what I am used to. For one thing, the disc that came with the decoder had the manual for the LokPilot and has no reference to sound at all. This totally confused me until my decoder supplier told me how to download the correct manual from LokSound's website. That helped but there is still a lot that I don't understand.
5. The decoder ran very nice right out of the box and I was able to make some lighting and volume adjustments very easily using Decoder Pro.
6. LokSound has a huge variety of U.S. diesel sounds available for download. Don't know about steam.
7. My decoder had one wire that poped loose as I was test fitting it in a loco. They are so small that I didn't want to risk trying to repair it. I sent it to LokSound and they fixed it quickly at no charge.
So, all in all, I really like LokSound, but when it comes to that $44 difference, I'm not so sure that I would want to spend that much over Digitrax, even if I was starting over. If you have just 2 or 3 locos, or if you could take the time to convert all of your locos over a period of time, then LokSound would be a good way to go. But, at my age, I wanted sound in everything and didn't want to wait too long to get it, so my choice of Digitrax was probably best for my situation.
Jerry
Rio Grande vs. Santa Fe.....the battle is over but the glory remains!
The Loksounds I have installed for others and myself to me not worth the cost. The horns are quiet and the bells I can hear in another room. You can get different speakers for them but they are 100 ohm and only can be had from some retailers. QSI and Tsunamis seem to be a better alternative. QSI solutions have a deep bass speaker that sounds great from a small diesel but are quite a challenge to fit. I take my locos to train shows and with all the noise around you need to hear the sounds. I am quite impressed with the Blueline steam sounds. With a decent motor decoder they run quite good. As for the sound bug or the MRC sounder I have not tried either.
The first Loksound I bought had a wire come off the plug and fried the decoder. I exchanged it and hardwired the replacement.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
Those of you complaining - have you tried adjusting the volume settings? There is a master volume plus independent volumes for motor/steam sounds, whistle, bell, and aux sounds. Default settings seem to max the motor/steam sounds and put the whistle/horn at about half. My PCM T-1 was liek this, adjusting the settings gave a much better overall level of sound.
The motor drives in the Loksound decoders are phenomenal. Definitely a few notches ahead of Digitrax, as are most of the (more expensive) European motor decoders. The downside to most of them (Loksound/Lokpilot, CTI, Zimo) is that while they offer complete control over the back-emf equation variables, they don't, at least in the English-language manuals, really tell you how these are used, so if one of the suggested settings isn't ideal for your particular motor, good luck tuning it other than trial and (lots of) error. The german manuals don;t tell you much more, either - I know enough German to be dangerous and there really is no more explanation of the motor control CVs in German than there is in the English translation. DecoderPro isn't much help, whoever wrote the decoder defs for CTI and Zimo didn't seem to know any more about this than what the manual said. At least you can set a loco running on speed step 1 and ops mode program it over and over again easily using DecoderPro.
That said, I doubt I am going to equip all my locos with $30-$40 motor decoders. They run well enough to suit me using $12 NCE decoders.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
David B. said:
"However, this allows them not to use a cap."
What is cap? Is it a sound chamber?
Randy R. said:
"The motor drives in the Loksound decoders are phenomenal. Definitely a few notches ahead of Digitrax"
What makes them better than Digitrax? My Digitrax decoders give me very smooth and slow speeds. In fact, my NCE, MRC, QSI and Atlas have as well. The LokSound is also very good but doesn't seem any better than the others. What am I missing?
Randy
I have one in an SD9 and have installed several in steam and diesels for freinds. The horn volumes are set at max and all other sounds are set at less than half volume. I am not complaining just stating a fact that Loksounds are good decoders but the horn/whistle volume was lower than most other sound decoders. At home in my quiet dungeon they sound good but put them in an auditorium with a few hundred people and you cant hear them. But I can hear the QSI and Soundtraxx and even the Bluelines.
jwils1 David B. said: "However, this allows them not to use a cap." What is cap? Is it a sound chamber? Randy R. said: "The motor drives in the Loksound decoders are phenomenal. Definitely a few notches ahead of Digitrax" What makes them better than Digitrax? My Digitrax decoders give me very smooth and slow speeds. In fact, my NCE, MRC, QSI and Atlas have as well. The LokSound is also very good but doesn't seem any better than the others. What am I missing?
cap = capacitor. Notice with the Digitrax and QSI and Soundtraxx decoders there's a large capacitor that must be used, Loksound doesn't have this.
As for motor drive, if you have back-emf turned on on the Digitrax decoder and slowly increase speed one step at a time, you will see a 'jump' at one point. If you're not enabling back-emf you'll never see this. Since there's only so much a small microprocessor can do, when calulatign the proper response for back-emf, there's a bit or error in the result when it gets rounded off. It seems Digitrax dumps all this werror between two speed steps, making for a noticeable jump when you go from one to the other, vs the very smooth steps between most other speed steps. But instead of this being at the very last speed step or something, it's right in the middle. If you fiddle with the settings you can make it almost but not completely go away. The German brand decoders seem to as a whole use a much better back-emf algorithm. If you take identical brand locos and put a Digitrax motor decoder in one, and a CT Elektronic decoder in another, all else being equal, I gurantee the CT one will run more consistently at a slower speed. It's not as big a deal with HO where we have larger motors with more inertia in the armature as well as larger flywheels, but in N scale the difference is night and day, especially with less then awesome quality motors. IE, not that big a difference in a Kato model, much bigger difference with say an Arnold or Bachmann. I'll have to find a like to the youtube videos from a friend's layout. Some of his scratchbuilt N scale locos with the CT or Zimo decoders crawl reliably as slower speeds than even the very excellent Canon-motored Stewart Baldwin switcher I had. With these decoders you can actually count the armature rotation, they can turn the motor that slowly.
The downside, as I mentioned, is these decoders are quite expensive, relative to standard NCE and Digitrax and TCS decoders - even in the larger HO size. I haven't tried a newer TCS decoder now that they have back-emf capability. And also like I said, Digitrax, TCS, and NCE decoders make my locos run smoothly enough to suit my purposes, so I'll not be spending more than the cost of some of the locos to put a decoder in it. But they COULD be better if I spent the money. The PCM T1 with Loksound - once I adjusted it I could put it on speed step 1 and let it roll - it hardly looked like it was moving. Take your eye of it for a minute and look - it's a few inches up the track. Never got stuck or anything, and it you blocked it, the wheels would 'spin' in tiny little increments. Simply amazing performance especially with a steam loco - and I do not doubt that it wouldn't have run that well with a Digitrax decoder dirving the motor. Probably not searchable anymore, but I think I posted back a couple of years ago when I got it just how long it took to go around the 8x12 loop on the slowest speed - it was a long time.
Thanks for the explanations Randy. Very interesting info.
For me, Loksound is not so expensive like the other; here in Germany.
With Loksound I can change the sound with the programmer. That means I can get EVERY sound. Listen to my 44-ton . The friend who manages the programmer is a star wars fan.
I've use quite a few Loksound micro. A micro is in this RS-4 too.
Wolfgang
Pueblo & Salt Lake RR
Come to us http://www.westportterminal.de my videos my blog
I have about a dozen BLI locos and two Proto 2K with QSI sound decoders. I am a big fan of the steam units, but the diesels have some annoying characteristics.
I have 5 and counting Loksound decoders in my diesel fleet, and have standardized on this because the performance and configuration potential are amazing.
I did try a Digitrax 165/Soundbug, but wasn't as impressed as I thought I'd be. I'm still considering this setup for lashups that always run toegther and require many decoders, for example an ABA or ABBA set of F3, FA, Sharks, PA/B's or E units. This way I can have the exact same decoder in all units so they will surely speed match, and add sound to only A units, or what ever. At $25, plus an optional $45, this is very cost effective. Plus, these are road units and don't require quite the precise control of switchers.
The things I like best about Loksound are 1, as stated prevoiusly, the motor control is velvety smooth. Nothing that I've ever tried even comes close. It's very obvious to me. 2, I can set the accel and decel to replicate perfectly a rise in RPM before the unit begins to move and a drop to idle before the unit stops moving. Try as I may, I can't get either the DH165/Soundbug or the QSI to do this. 3, the programmer is expensive, but whoa! You can put any sound file in any decoder, change functions, pull any single sound from any pre-packaged file and put it in another, etc, etc.To solve the weak horn syndrome, I download all the sound files and play them until I find one I like, then copy and paste it into the file that's in the unit I'm working on. To me the factory horns in the units I have sound like european trams or streetcars. I've set all my Loksound units to be silent unless "started up", and mapped that function to F6, so they at least sort of match the BLI steamers.
Until I tried the Loksound 3.5, my favorite decoder was the NCE D13SR series. I thought it had the smothest motor control of the 1/2 dozen or so I'd tried.
As stated before, the manual is a little dry, and you can tell it's been translated. The wire connections are also fragile, also stated before. I put a drop of caulk on mine before I install.
If I'm willing to put up with fairly complex technical writing that sounds like it came right out of a German-English dictionary (or a Monty Python sketch), tiny wires that are tedious and dangerous (to the decoder) to resolder, and an almost 3:2 price premium (I'd buy them by the case at a 1/2 off sale), I'd say that I think that they are definately worth it.
Additional info: after researcing the QSI revolution (and v7 chips), it apears that you can only replace the entire sound "package", and not individual sounds. I haope they make that available in the future. I don't know how the Digitrax programmer works.
As I've mentioned on other threads I'm still thrilled with my Lok Sound equipped Genesis SD45-2. The sound of the 20 cylinder EMD 645 prime mover is unmistakable. A programmer is a wonderful tool as my friend uploaded a longer air "pop-off" sound as well as an edited Leslie RS5T-RR0 horn that came from dieselairhorns.com . It's a head turner when cruising on a layout. I hope to put it to video and up load it to my Photbucket as I may have access to a decent camcorder soon.
"I like my Pullman Standards & Budds in Stainless Steel flavors, thank you!"
Several years ago I made the choice to go in to DCC. In my typical fashion I researched every aspect thoroughly and decided to go with Loksound decoders. I purchased several 3.5 and micro decoders along with the Lokprogrammer. The decision was a great one! I'm pleased with the fine motor control, great sound, and ease of reprogramming via the Lokprogrammer.
In addition, the Loksound forum offers much in the line of information and uploads. In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Loksound is worth it.
The Cedar Branch & Western--The Hillbilly Line!