I had an enjoyable day out at Doncaster yesterday and succumbed to the persuasive powers of a superbly weathered Bachmann 37/5 in Railfreight Metals livery from 'Dirty Boy' / Lord & Butler. Whilst I am reasonably skilled at weathering, this was in a different league and I was happy to pay the money.

As a bonus the loco came pre-fitted with the latest SWD v4 chip so it was a good opportunity to listen to the competition. After trying it 'out of the box' it was clear that the dire speaker fit by Bachmann was seriously letting it down so as an experiment I took my v4 chip and tried it with Bachmann's speaker fit, and put SWD's chip in my loco with my tank-mounted Alan Butcher bass-reflex speaker. The improvement to the SWD sound when put through a proper speaker fit was truly astonishing. And of course the converse was true; the degradation to my chip when played through the Bachmann speaker was equally astonishing. The moral of the story is, regardless of who's chip you use, it pays to improve your speaker and speaker fit.

In other news my 73 now has an Alan Butcher 28x40 speaker and v4 chip in. Early experiments served only to reveal the shortcomings of the new Hornby motor. Mind you, it's brand new and hasn't been run in yet so this may improve. When I'm finished playing with the 37's I'll put some effort into developing the 73 sound project. One aspect I'm giving some thought to is just how to give the user control of the change from diesel to electric power and visa-versa. I'd be interested to hear from any 73 drivers on what can and can't be done, and what sounds happen when etc, so I can get everything just right.