# those other sounds



## bmwr71 (Jan 30, 2010)

I am on a layout sound forum and I think I am the only G guy on there and they almost never speak of onboard sound and it is usually about background sounds or locomotive sound that is from stationary speakers. I guess that is what you must do when dealing with small models. But recently there has been some talk about onboard sound (I did mention it some in the past but it didn't get much attention). What has been discussed is doing some onboard sounds for things like brake squeal, flat wheel bump, and rail clacking at joints. As I don't use DCC, I was thinking along the lines of using an MP3 player or perhaps one of those message recorder units. And for brake squeal, I even wondered if one could make some circuit that could produce that sound and not play a recording. I had thought that some sounds might be triggered by something like an inertia switch. The other guys are looking at doing something with DCC. So wondered if anyone here has tried anything like this? And I also saw on ebay where a guy was selling a custom made water tank to go with the Bachmann steam donkey that had some sound system in it for the donkey and wondered if anyone tried something like that?

Doug


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## lownote (Jan 3, 2008)

I do most of that with DCC; the clacking at joints actually happens if you have metal wheels. 

On DC, the problem would triggering the sounds at the right time. QSI makes a controller, the "quantum engineer," that lets DC users control most of the sounds on its DCC decoders. The QSI sound decoders can also run on DC. 

With other sound cards, you can trigger sounds with reed switches, or with proprietary control systems--the Phoenix cards will do exact;y what you want. 

If you have good ears and good synth/sampling software, you can make a lot of sounds. But I'm still not sure how you'd trigger them


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## Dan Pierce (Jan 2, 2008)

Many Zimo sound projects have brake squeal kick in when the engine sloes down to a stop. This can be automatic and/or tied to a function key. Works on analog also. 

We even set up an engine to enable a trolley to have brake squeal by magnet when entering a curve and switched reed sensing to make it direction dependent!!


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