Playing with sound.
Entry posted by Dave John
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Sound on model railways tends to be a bit of a contentious issue. Some folk love it, others hate it. I’m not sure. Many would advocate the dcc and on board sound route, when done well I’d agree it can be very impressive. Well, it could be if anyone starts doing sound chips for CR locos.
A decade or so back I had a go with dcc. No technical issues, I got it all to work but I really didn’t like it. My mistake was probably to use a Bachmann dynamis controller. I just didn’t get on with peering at a tiny lcd screen instead of watching the trains. My preference is for a simple hand held controller with a rotary knob and a proper direction switch which I can use without having to look at it or keep the controller pointing at the base station. ( I dug it out earlier this year to see if it was worth bothering with and discovered it has now packed up. Oh well. )
But what do I want from sound? Most of the time I am observing trains from a scale 100 yards or more. I would hear whistles, perhaps the heavier exhaust beats and some rail squeal, perhaps buffers clanking during shunting. These would be in the background of all the sound generated in the urban environment, a horse and cart on a cobbled road close to me would be much louder than a train in the distance. The highly detailed sound files for dcc now available might be right if you are very close to a model, but they don’t seem to scale well over a normal viewing distance. At least thats the impression I get from seeing them at exhibitions.
Anyway, a while back I came across this;
It’s the price of a fish supper, so I bought a couple on spec. Tests show that it works exactly as it should, put 10 sounds on a micro sd, switch a pin down to 0v and the chosen sound plays.
Here is a pic of it on the bench with a twin infra red detector board. ( I could post the circuit diagram of the board, but there are probably simpler solutions. I just happened to have the bits to do it that way)
So, what about the sounds. Ah, my record. Well, this record;
I have recorded the whole thing into a computer file then split it up into identifiable bits using a program called audacity. Still messing about a bit with the files to get a good clean sound. The idea works, I could have two types of whistle triggered by the IR gates then the rest called at random intervals. something like that.
I do know that there are a lot of fancy things out there, sound cards that are dcc addressed and so on. My thinking behind this is that it is a very cheap project, if I decide I really don’t like ambient sound at all then I haven’t wasted a lot of money.
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