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After a lot of research and hemming and hawing I went ahead and gulped and bought a Phoenix 2k2 board for my Aristo Mikado. I have previously used the small scale railways soundcard, which is cheap and sounds good but has some limits--for example, the steam chuff stops when the whistle blows. The Phoenix is more easily controlled and can play multiple sounds at once. My conclusion is that it's more than I need and I'm kind of sorry I bought it.
Installation is pretty easy. It shipped with a speaker but I'm using the one that was already in the tender. All the connection points on the soundcard are clealry labled. In my case I ran two wires to the track power pickups in the tender, plugged the battery and the speaker in, and installed the reed switch to control the chuff sound. Later I added reed switches to trigger whistle and bell. It can be modified witha compputer ionterface, but I didn 't buy that--for one thing, I use an Apple and the PC world is alien to me. The phoenix software only works with PCs
Sound quality: sound is really good. But it has a good bit of reverb on it. I'm a semi-pro musician and do a fair amount of recording, and the reverb they added is very clear. Most of the time reverb makes things sound better. But it also adds an un-natural quality, because you're hearing reverb that isn't appropriate to the surroundings. I can see why they did it but I wish they hadn't. It's not a big deal, and probably most people will hear it as sounding good. It does sound good, I'd just rather not hear the sound of some other room when the whislte blows
It gets LOUD. Louder than I would ever want. It has excellent sounding brakes, blowdown, coupler clank, etc.
There are some confusing things about it, confusing to me at least. For example, It can be wired so that voltage triggers the chuff, which seems like it'd be a great way to go, excep that I'm using Aristo's onboard train engineer to control speed, and I'm not sure how to wire that. Aristo's manuals are comically slight and it's not all that clear in the Phoenix manual. I maybe will call Phoenix and ask.
aristo sells an accessory switch (55495) which can be used to truigger sounds. I've been thinking of using that to trigger some of the sounds manually--the whistle and the bell, nbut also (I think) things like the sound of water entering the tender or caol being shoveled. But here again directions are pretty unclear. I've also order Del Tapparo's Smart Sound trigger to randomize the reed switches, so they don't always blow the same way at the same place.
I think if you're running DCC or one of the more sophisticated remote systems, like Airwire or RCS, and have a PC, the Phoenix card is more fun than sex, but for what I'm doing it seems like overkill. And I don't like that reverb....
It's a high quality unit with a ton of options, but it's not cheap or easy to take advantage of all of them and I might have been better off buying something simpler. On the other hand, I might end up getting a more sophisticated setup and being happy I got the Phoenix
Installation is pretty easy. It shipped with a speaker but I'm using the one that was already in the tender. All the connection points on the soundcard are clealry labled. In my case I ran two wires to the track power pickups in the tender, plugged the battery and the speaker in, and installed the reed switch to control the chuff sound. Later I added reed switches to trigger whistle and bell. It can be modified witha compputer ionterface, but I didn 't buy that--for one thing, I use an Apple and the PC world is alien to me. The phoenix software only works with PCs
Sound quality: sound is really good. But it has a good bit of reverb on it. I'm a semi-pro musician and do a fair amount of recording, and the reverb they added is very clear. Most of the time reverb makes things sound better. But it also adds an un-natural quality, because you're hearing reverb that isn't appropriate to the surroundings. I can see why they did it but I wish they hadn't. It's not a big deal, and probably most people will hear it as sounding good. It does sound good, I'd just rather not hear the sound of some other room when the whislte blows
It gets LOUD. Louder than I would ever want. It has excellent sounding brakes, blowdown, coupler clank, etc.
There are some confusing things about it, confusing to me at least. For example, It can be wired so that voltage triggers the chuff, which seems like it'd be a great way to go, excep that I'm using Aristo's onboard train engineer to control speed, and I'm not sure how to wire that. Aristo's manuals are comically slight and it's not all that clear in the Phoenix manual. I maybe will call Phoenix and ask.
aristo sells an accessory switch (55495) which can be used to truigger sounds. I've been thinking of using that to trigger some of the sounds manually--the whistle and the bell, nbut also (I think) things like the sound of water entering the tender or caol being shoveled. But here again directions are pretty unclear. I've also order Del Tapparo's Smart Sound trigger to randomize the reed switches, so they don't always blow the same way at the same place.
I think if you're running DCC or one of the more sophisticated remote systems, like Airwire or RCS, and have a PC, the Phoenix card is more fun than sex, but for what I'm doing it seems like overkill. And I don't like that reverb....
It's a high quality unit with a ton of options, but it's not cheap or easy to take advantage of all of them and I might have been better off buying something simpler. On the other hand, I might end up getting a more sophisticated setup and being happy I got the Phoenix