grumpy old trainguy,
Wow, your 6th post, and you're slamming everyone here. I'm suprised you were able to wait so long. I mean, it must be almost 24 whole hours since you registered here. Most people take a little longer to form a negative opinion, threaten economic sanctions against Kalmbach, and propose censorship of the forum based on what products one owns. Congratulations! 
In the event you are serious, allow me to tell you about the "joys" of MRC DCC sound decoders.
I am the Operations Chairman and "DCC guru" at my large (10,000 sq. ft.), old (est. 1938) railroad club (www.ssmrc.org). We have about 60+ members, and when we started a new layout in 1998, we went with Digitrax DCC. All locos used in Operations or that are left on the layout overnight must be registered. Our registration is currently just over 750 locos. We have monthly decoder clinics where we help each other install decoders and program them.
IOW, I've witnessed a lot of DCC installs and programming (literally, hundreds).
I can say with authority that nothing gives us more problems than MRC sound decoders. Nothing!
For example, one member bought 4 SD45's with MRC sound. We were able to program one of them. He also bought some F-units, and we weren't able to program any of them. He sold them all, eventually.
Several other members have installed the Atlas S-unit MRC sound board. I think that's up to 10 locos, now. Six of them failed, either to program or while running and were all sent back to MRC for repair.
When the Athearn Challengers were new, one member went through three of them, and we couldn't get any of them to program.
Another member has an Athearn Big Boy with MRC sound. While it does run, it also loses it's address occasionally and it's a pain to get it back to rights.
A few other members have bought the small Roundhouse steamers. I'd say we have about a 50% failure rate, there, too. They run, but they won't program.
Then there's the MP15's with MRC sound. A member bought one, and it had built-in momentum so bad that it took 10 seconds to start to move, and just as long to stop. This behavior could not be changed. After the first crash where it went through a bumper post onto the mainline, the loco was returned.
Did you know that it's impossible to read an MRC decoder? Did you know that when you program an MRC loco to a new address, it doesn't work anymore because it's some random DCC address? You can't program it back, because the address is something you can't read. It's a flaming pain in the butt.
Oh, and my favorite part? If you are running a multi-unit lash up, and there's a track short for some reason, all your MRC sound locos stop working! Yep, they cease to operate until you can turn them back on. Which means that you have to manually select each one, wake it up, then go to the next one. This is highly annoying.
As a rule of thumb, we tell members of our club not to buy MRC DCC anything. The member of our club that owns a hobby shop refuses to stock them since they are such dogs. He'll order them for you, but only after warning you about what you're getting.
But the best one of all is when the MRC factory rep. lied to my face. Back in January, the MRC Atlas switcher sound decoder was just out but I hadn't heard it yet. Rumors were swirling on the Atlas Forum that they used the wrong sound effect. Alco S-units used 539 prime movers, a 6-cylinder diesel with dinner plate-sized pistons (yes, I've actually stuck my head into a 539 engine block). What MRC had done was use an Alco 244 RS-3 prime mover as it's diesel sound. A 244 is a V-12 (RS-type) or V-16 (PA-type) with smaller cylinders.
I was at the Springfield (MA) show in January, and MRC was there with their factory booth. I went up to the rep. at the table, and introduced myself, then asked him about the Atlas S-unit sound board. He had a demo set up and running (but due to the cavernous room and the near-by MTH booth, one could barely hear it). I told him I had heard a rumor on the internet that the MRC board was a 244 instead of a 539. He denied it. "Oh, no, we record all our own sound effects. If that's what the switcher had, then that's what we put into it." And then he went on about how MRC did things right, like recording each notch seperately instead of pitch bending it like other manufacturers do, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, when you play the MRC board, it sounds like an RS-3, not an S-2. And just this summer, one of their advertisements on the back of MR (the one with a NH FL9), it actually lists the Alco S-unit sound board as having an Alco 244 prime mover. Oops!
As for your Abbot and Costello routine, the difference here isn't that bad things just happen to locos that have MRC sound boards in them, it's that the MRC boards cause the failure at a much higher rate than any other brand. Using your hat analogy, what if over half the hats made by the Susquehana Hat Company on Bagle Street tore in half when you first put it on your head? Or maybe the hat brim fell off when you tugged on it? Would you continue to buy hats from the Susquehana Hat Company on Bagle Street if they continually failed when they were brand new under the most mild use imaginable?
And we're not slamming their DC powerpack line. If anything, I continue to be impressed by their ruggedness after decades of use. This only makes their DCC ineptitude even more perplexing.
As for stress, you haven't lived until you tell a new member fresh to the hobby that the loco that he just spent $240 on won't work because it won't take a DCC address. And even tho' your the DCC guru, you can't fix it. They look at you with their puppy dog eyes and ask you why? You have to tell them because MRC is J-U-N-K, and that it's going to have to be returned to MRC for a fix because there's nothing that can be done by you. That just sucks the life out of the party, know what I mean?
BTW, as for folks not complaining about anything else, only MRC? Did you not see davidmbedard complaining about Tsunamis in the other thread? If anything model railroaders love to complain.
And spare me the "it's because of the internet" Salem witch trials act. Go back and read some old MR's from back in the day. My club has an almost complete collection. There were a lot of compaints about plastic vs. metal/wood, kits vs scratchbuilding, 6vdc vs. 12vdc, tinplate vs. scale, etc. Complaining has been the lifeblood of model railroading since Joshua Lionel Cowen was a little boy. It's not a recent development in the human condition. What's that Billy Joel line? "The good old days weren't always good..."
Paul A. Cutler III
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Weather Or No Go New Haven
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