Now that a second manufacturer is addressing the ambient bass sounds of locomotives are more of us seeing a need to add this layer of sound to our layouts?
I know there has been a lot of discussion about the parameters of sound being reproduced by our models from just about every perspective. But in the end what attracted a lot of us to trains was that amazing earth shaking rumble and noise of thousands of horsepower pulling thousands of tons of freight. I know we also try to rationalize it to scale. But in the end for some of us that dimension is still missing. I still hear on quiet mornings when the wind blows up from the south the rumble of trains on the ex Mopac San Antonio to Palestine line 8 miles away to the south of me.
I currently have about 13 more locos that need sound decoders so the surroundtraxx has become very attractive to me especially at a savings cost of 800.00. I plan to run the sound through an AV receiver to 4.1 sound. If I use it just for ambient sound and keep it low I'm thinking it would compliment the locos I do have sound in. Is this a trend like dcc and sound itself, or a fringe passing fancy?
thoughts?
Thanks
Steve B
SurroundTraxx requires Digitrax decoders and a Digitrax Transponding implementation to work the way it is supposed to. Only Digitrax decoders do transponding, so all decoders must be Digitrax - one or two are compatible but wouldn't actually Transpond, other just wipe out the Transponding signal adn can't be used. Plus the whole thing is quite touchy and fussy to get working, even on a fairly basic layout. Make something complex (as in, actually meant for operations) and good luck. It's not that anything is poorly made, it's that the Transponding signal is a tiny little low power pulse being sent through the high power DCC signal AND the inherent electrical noise of a model railroad.
RF signaling like the Rolling Thunder uses is a more robust way, but it too is proprietary to BLI's decoders. It is NOT the same as SurroundTraxx - Rollign Thunder only pulls off the low frequencies, to get sound the loco still needs a sound decoder. The lows which cannot be reproduced by a tiny on board speaker are sent to an under-layout subwoofer. For this to take off, they really need to allow multiple channels to one receiver, and design some sort of add on so it works with other decoders. Until someone comes out with a way to do this that works with my existing locos, it's not getting implemented on my layout. Non-loco ambient sounds? I'll have that. There are many options, and it's not dependent on the control system for the trains, so there are no issue implementing any one you like.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Randy,
Yes the proprietary nature of the bli system is a big turnoff unless you are a big buyer of their stuff from here on out. The surroundtraxx though can be used in the non transponding mode for an overall ambient locomotive sound with deep bass. In fact I owned the first of the soundtrax analoge sound units back in the early to late nineties on my first layout. The sounds were all electronic but most visitors liked the added dimension. The rumble was great as it ran through Cerwin Vega speakers.
I will admit this might be a little confusing and maybe annoying on large club or basemeant layouts without transponding. But most layouts are smaller. Mine is 18 by 18 inside walk around.
But just the the fact these guys are bringing this stuff to market makes me think more people are wanting this. I am very interested in what future technologies might lead to here. Hopefully someone can implement this into a line of decoders similar to what bli has done.
Technicaly, a generic equivalent of BLI's system is possible - assuming you have room for the board, there's nothign that would prevent a design that goes inline with the speaker wires and does a bandpass filter to extract the lows and pass through the higher frequencies to the onboard speaker, and then incorporates the same sort of wireless broadcast to a base station the drives a subwoofer. Getting it small enough to work in more than just the biggest of locos might be the problem, but in trade off, you wouldn;t have to necessarily use the biggest speaker you cna cram in because the low sounds you are trying to reproduce would be sent out to the stationary unit.
This works even for larger layouts because the low frequency sounds aren;t very dirctional. You don;t need speakers every few feet so the sound can 'follow' the train - the directional highs continue to follow the train because the speaker is on board, the non-directional lows come from a sub anywhere under the layout, or even above it.