Harlequin

Here's a video comparing the sounds with and without the speaker enclosure. I'm not making any great claims about this - you can hear a difference but it's not earth-shattering. Sound haters don't need to comment, thanks. I know the sound is a bit weedy.

The Hornby version has a slightly dodgy firebox but, yes, it's a pretty good loco even allowing for the age of the tooling. I might still get a Dapol version but I'll wait to see what they're like this time before committing.

For all the flaws of the Hornby 28xx, it does at least have the black parts painted black and a firebox top that doesn't make it look like a hunchback...

Hmmm, I love the old twenty-eights but I'm about to cancel my pre-order for a Dapol 28xx because I have no faith that they will get them right! Too many mistakes on recent items.

Readers of this thread might have missed this important update about bolections on the Twin Cities livery versions:

I have one word to say to that: Bolections. 😉

Hi "Olive" 😄, From your description it sounds like a very usable building. If you can insulate the cavity (take advice on whether that might cause damp problems) then you wouldn't need to insulate the walls internally. That would give you more room and make it easier to fix the layout to the walls. The garage door would need something semi-permanent built inside the opening to seal it up from drafts and insulate that end of the space. The roof structure needs to be insulated and the internal surface sealed to the internal wall leaf to stop drafts from blowing under the eaves and into the space. BUT make sure that the roof timbers themselves are still ventilated and can "breath". Again take advice. A simple wood frame in-filled with insulation boards and covered in OSB on the floor will make that a bit warmer to stand on. It doesn't matter if the floor's not level because you will level the baseboards independently. When creating the floor frame you might want to allow for baseboard legs to extend right down to the concrete for good solid support.

It's less than 24 hours since you posted photos, way too soon to give up! Give it time and try to contact a local club, as advised.

It's true. You can modify them if you want the "Rolls-Royce version" that addresses some potential problems but it's not compulsory and out of the box they will work fine 99.9% of the time.

Underframe details are often visible when vehicles are running on embankments and the viewpoint is slightly below. Seeing the correct gubbins in silhouette makes the view more realistic.

Sorry I used the wrong term. I meant passive radiator.

Thanks Mike, Most DCC speakers are supplied with sealed enclosures. Some have bass reflex ports passive radiators but they are still sealed. Have a look at YouChoos speaker catalogue, for example. In the Hifi world both sealed and ported speakers are used.

That's what the internet says about hifi speakers but empirically I think a sealed enclosure makes the sound louder when used with the typical miniature speaker we're using.

That's a really horrible thing to happen to a cat. Poor Marble! If your theory is correct, someone has been very irresponsible putting rat poison, or traps, down in a way that allows cats or any larger wildlife to come into contact with it. Can the vets counter the poison in some way?

It's best practice to use speakers with a sealed enclosure behind them to contain and absorb sound waves from the back of the diaphragm so that you mainly hear the waves from the front of the speaker without the rear waves interfering and thus you get clearer, louder results. The factory-installed speaker in the SRM is open to the interior of the body, which is not an acoustically sealed enclosure and has walls thin enough to transmit some of the internal sound. So, I designed and 3D-printed a speaker enclosure to fit over the factory-fitted speaker and, since the speaker is housed in the luggage compartment, I disguised it as a pile of Edwardian luggage. Here's the prototype: Please excuse the dodgy painting. I unsoldered the lighting capacitor and moved it up into the ceiling space with flying leads (there's plenty of room): Then I unsoldered the speaker, removed it and fitted it into the new enclosure (you can see there's a ring to hold it in place with a dab of black tack: The new assembly is a tight fit over the SRM speaker housing and pushes the speaker down onto it's seat. The original screws hold the enclosure in place: With the speaker wires threaded back up through the PCB and soldered back to their pads, the body could go back on for a test. After all that I can report that it really does seem to improve the sound - but not by an astounding amount. And the luggage is only visible on rare occasions when the lighting is just right. It was an interesting little project.

I hope you're not condemning the whole idea on the strength of one loco! If the bass sounds are thin and weak but the higher frequencies are good then it's likely that the speaker is open to the air on both sides. Factory fitted sound is often not the best that can be achieved. The first factory sound-fitted loco I got sounded thin, unrealistic and disappointing. Since then I've learned how to install speakers for the best output. Decoders, speakers and sound projects have improved over the same period and I now have locos that make real rich deep sounds. OK, they still don't compare with the real thing but that smaller sound seems perhaps more "in scale".

I nearly jumped out of my seat! At 2:35 the narrator uses the word "Embiggened"! Is that a sly nod to The Simpsons or was it used seriously? 🤣

The 2015 statement put out by TCS (referred to in many sources) seems to be unfindable online. My guess is that it has been removed as part of the settlement with Lais. The following page contains a very informative post by Stuart Baker who is an "industry insider", possibly even a TCS insider: https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/laisdcc-decoders-12509538 That's the closest I can get to "the horse's mouth" at the moment.

Have you tried searching the forum? https://www.rmweb.co.uk/search/?q=lais tcs&quick=1&type=forums_topic

There’s still a lot of room for improvement with in-loco sound generation. Speakers are improving all the time. The way they are mounted in the loco and the sound path out is gradually being recognised as important. Edit: You'd think most of that would be basic and well-understood by now but a well-respected manufacturer recently produced a sound-fitted loco with a plain sugar cube speaker, without a sealed enclosure at all, let alone of sufficient size to do anything useful and all that was buried in the centre of a tender with no air path out! It was noted as producing very poor sounds by many but amazingly other people applauded it for having "great sound". So it seems there's a long way to go in modellers understanding what good sounds actually are as well as all the purely technical improvements. And, yes, you can break the laws of physics in this case! There’s a technique called “psycho-acoustics“ which makes the brain fill in the missing low frequencies to some degree. It could easily be applied to sound decoders but I’m not aware that anyone has done so yet.

He's probably just sulking and feeling sorry for himself. Give him a bit of time for the wound to heal in warm, familiar surroundings and he should start to get back to normal.

Yep I agree. The roof colour of this batch of vans is spot on. Nicely done, Rapido.

"No lamp in the cringing" - the ripping new detective novel by Euphemia Volestrangler. 😆

https://brierleyhillshedsandsummerhouses.co.uk/?product=20x12-summerhouse-2ft-canopy

Does the 12ft dimension include the verandah? You may need to allow for some internal insulation to make the space usable in winter and high summer.