New ERR Railsound Boards

I put one in my MTH Railking RS3, along with the Cruise Commander.  I haven't noticed any static, but I never had one of the old boards either.  Great sound by the way.

I'm just the process of installing one of these; also I think that they have been incorporated in some recent 3rd Rail models.

I think that the sound is considerably improved but it really depends in part on what speaker and speaker enclosure you are using. The ones supplied by ERR are pretty good for the cost but I am experimenting with others.

The static/background noise is at least reduced although to my ear I can still detect some in diesel sounds.

I've installed a number of them, the sounds are much better.  The background noise is pretty much gone, and the range of sounds is better.  The package is much more compact, which allows sound in a lot more small motorized units.  I put a Cruise Commander and the RS Commander in an RMT Beep, I couldn't do that with the old RS Commander.

As stated, the speaker and enclosure is all important for any sound board, including this one.

John, does this board raise sound quality in my RS4 NKP Berk #779 with some background static to near RS5?

Does it add more steam engine sounds then original RS4?

Joe

I asked this question once before, but the boards were still new and nobody knew for sure.

My biggest complaint with RS5 is that you have no control over the whistle (not sure about the horn in diesels).  When you pull down the CAB2's whistle slider, sometime you get a short whistle, other times a very long one.  Great sound, but you can't do forward/ back/ crossing signals.

A while back a forum member did a video of their new 3rd Rail engine (yes, I have one but its packed away).  In the video it looked like they did have control over the whistle, varying the sound with the slider.  It was very short, so I wasn't sure.

I have one conventional engine left to upgrade (a 3rd Rail Q1), and I'm trying to decide which upgrade system to use.  Can one of you that has a steam engine ungraded with one of the new ERR boards do a check and see how the whistle works. That would be great. Thanks.

Ron

The only thing I see in this regard is many of the RS boards alter the tone of the horn for successive horn blasts.  However, the duration is dependent on how long you hold the button.

This engine has the new ERR installed Small steam sound along with a Cruise "M". This engine is from the world famous "Duckunder & Terminal RR. In a day or two I will post the sounds for large steam and articulated.

That's right. Current LEGACY locomotives behave the same way when not in quilling mode.

I still have a few more of the older Lionel Scale steamers to upgrade from the original Railsounds 1.

I am going to be using the 50mm 8ohm Fatboy Speakers I got from Lionel with the enclosures. The baby fat boy speakers that come with kits, seem like to be to small to get a nice volume of sound

One thing that is true, there is a minimum length of a whistle or horn blast with TMCC.  Even a brief push gets about 1 second of sound.  You can't get a really quick honk-honk like you can with the programmed crossing sounds that MTH does.  However, you can hold the horn down for 30 seconds or more and it'll just keep going.

Note that the quilling trigger is more responsive than the original TMCC CAB1-style horn command. You can create short toot-toot gestures--but this applies only to engines which have the quilling horn function in them.

Thanks Boxcar Bill, that is a sweet whistle!  -Ken

Right Rudy, on Legacy locomotives I can get really short blasts, they are truly as short as the lever actuation. 

It's just TMCC that has the lower limit in how short the horn sound can be.  I'm presuming from looking at the code in the ERR conventional whistle board (wonder when they'll list that)  that it's the debounce of the whistle command.

John & Bill:

Thank you for your comments and the video. Very helpful information.

Yes, John,  the LEGACY and TMCC command spec is the right place to look. The original TMCC HORN1 command has no "off", just an "on." So the sound system must wait for an absence of horn triggers to time-out. The quilling whistle, in contrast, uses a whistle with intensity=0 to explicitly indicate "off," which is why it provides superior short whistle blows. Works the same way on CAB-1L and CAB2, although the physical controls obviously differ.

I guess now that the Legacy commands have been released, I could actually find that out by reading that document!   I figured there must be more positive control for Legacy, a lot of the functions are more "crisp".  The other thing I notice is that Legacy stops the brake sounds the instant the locomotive comes to a complete stop, where the RailSounds boards typically have the sounds run on for some period after the stop.