MTH PS-2 SPEAKER/SOUND DISTORTION

Top suspect is the speaker, I'd STOP using it until you check it out.  The older 5V units had many speaker issues, the plating on the speaker peels off and eventually kills the amplifier. 

What he said. The good news is, replacement speakers from MTH are cheap, they don't go bad like the originals, and they sound better than the old ones did when they were new. Get a new speaker. It's less than ten bucks and takes half an hour to replace. 

Here's a picture of the old and new speakers. You can see the flaked plating on the old one on the  right. The new speaker on the left is obviously plated with a different material. As a bonus, the sticker on the new one has the MTH part number to help you order. One note, this speaker is for a PS/2 engine with 5v boards (9v battery). I assume that's what your Mikado has, but check before ordering. The newer, 3v system may use a different speaker, I'm not sure about that. As far as I know it was only the older units that had the chronic speaker problem. 

-

Fantastic information. I love this forums. You all are a bunch of great guys, that together, make this hobby the best of the best.

The sell already sent me an email that he was going to send me a new speaker at no cost to me.

Thanks for all you help.

RAY

I replaced mine with 2 , 8 ohm ones wired in series,shown here

www.jcstudiosinc.com/BlogShowThread?id=621

Dale H

Make sure the new speaker is a 16 ohm speaker or you will run the risk of blowing out the amp on the PS-2 Board.

Number is BF-0000033.  G

I had the same situation a couple weeks ago, spoke with GGG about it, and bought a new speaker replacement from him as well. Made the swap and all is fine. It blew me away that the stock speaker went bad like that, especially just sitting on the shelf for most of its life....but oh well. $14 repair and should last awhile now.  

I was looking at some of the H.O. "Hi-Bass" 8-ohm speakers with enclosures as a possibility. Using them in pairs (parallel for 4-ohm/series for 160-ohm) to give some better sound options. Their small size allows for additional mounting location options.

Where do you buy your Hi-Bass speakers?  Might be an option for some of the stuff I'm doing.

 I took Dale's advice and ordered several speakers from Madison.

https://ogrforum.com/t.../replacement-speaker

Remember to match the ohms with the model of PS you're using!!

There was a lot of room in that 3rd Rail's Allegheny's tender. The 3v PS2 board loads down to 4 ohm.

 I got some big ones for G gauge upgrade replacements.

I've been reading the specs on them. Out here, Railmaster Hobbies sells several. Also found some at Tony's Train Exchange (a lot of DCC information there) here. I've also been looking a the Maidsound speakers. The problem with diesels is you really only have two locations -- the fuel tank or the dummy unit

The reason I was interested in the H.O.-sized speakers is they're in the 1" size range and handle 2 Watts at 8 Ohms. The MTH speakers are between 3 and 5 Watts, which I'm a little concerned about, but I don't think the amp puts out too much power for these speakers. A thought about that was doubling up the number of smaller speakers used to raise the impedance. My father used to tell me about a old HiFi speaker system called the "Sweet 16" which was a large enclosure made up of sixteen smaller speakers arranged in series/parallel combinations to provide large sound at a lower cost (back then big full-range speakers were REALLY expensive.)

I like the stuff at Tony's, looks like you have a number of choices.

I don't know if you read any of the technical info posted on speakers there, but it was misleading.  They talk about parallel wiring being better but never address impedance changes. I wonder how may folks added an extra 8 ohm speaker in parallel with a second for a board meant for 8 ohm total.  G

As they have said, not the sellers fault, almost all our PS-2 engines have developed speaker issues, unfortunately MTH has no replacement for some of them like our Aero Train.

Learned the speaker impedance issue quickly, but fortunately not the hard way -- twice the impedance you lose some power; half the impedance, you can lose your amp.

What I thought was interesting is that MTH went from 16-Ohm to 4-Ohm as it made 8-Ohm replacement pairs so attractive. It's just a matter of proper wiring.