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I have an odd failure of a RailSounds 5 board, one that I confess I've never seen.  This is on the Lionel scale Cab Forward with RS5.

 

The tender responds to whistle, bell, and crew talk.  However, I get no idle sounds and no chuffing.  Initially, I thought it was the chuff switch, but I should get idle sounds.  I swapped a different tender, and all was well, so that gets me into the tender.

 

The bottom line is some sort of failure of the actual RS5 board that only affects the steam idle sounds and the chuffing. I reseated the RS chips, that fixes a lot of oddities on these boards, but no change.  I popped a RS4 steam board in, and everything worked as intended.

 

I moved the chips to another RS5 board, and we're back in business.  Since all the sound is really triggered by the same serial stream from the IR receiver, I'm at a loss as to what hardware failure on the board could result in these symptoms.

 

Has anyone else seen a failure like this?

 

Second question, I can't seem to find a number to order a blank RS5 board.  I know they must be available, as I previously purchased one and that's how I was able to repair this locomotive.  I want to replace that board as it's clear I should have a spare.

 

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I realize that Marty, I was curious about the type of failure.  I had communication, but only the steam idle sounds and chuff didn't work.  Whistle, bell, and crew-talk all worked fine over the IR link.  I have just never seen one fail in that fashion, and I was curious if anyone else had seen it.  When the chuff failed, I first started chasing the chuff switch, but then I realized that the smoke was chuffing away properly, obviously the switch was working.

 

It's obviously the physical RS5 board as the chips are working fine in another RS5 board, and that board fails with a different set of RS5 audio chips in the same way.

 

Very strange...

John, this sounds as though the "blended" or background sounds are turned all the way off. In current product, this is controlled by cab remote volume button presses. As TWolf correctly mentioned, in older product there was a physical switch that turned off most everything except whistle and bell (trivia alert:  the Railsounds team always called this the "Kughn switch," because he originally requested the feature).

 

I can't recall if the RS5.0-era product still had the switch. But I'd bet money that the cause of the unusual failure is related to the fact these two sets of sounds are grouped into two separate sets, and the sound system, for whatever reason, thinks it is doing as directed and playing only the user triggered "foreground" sounds.

Yep, I figured it was time to move on, it was the oddest failure I've seen.  Typically, the few RS boards that I've had fail were just dead or static generators.  That's what happened to my last bad RS board, whenever I put chips into it, it would just sound like a thunderstorm.

 

Thanks for responding Rudy, if this is the worst failure I have, I'll consider myself lucky.

 

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