SoundTraxx equipment

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The decoder that never was

I waited years for the large scale Tsunami. I wanted to save money and not follow the early practice of putting a motor decoder and a sound decoder in each loco. 

The HO Tsunami has been very popular, but it has taken a long time to get both steam and diesel in the HO model.

Along the way, a "Quasinami" was produced and put in the Bachmann 3 truck shay (1:20.3). There was no support from Bachmann (they said call Soundtraxx) and no support from Soundtraxx (they OEM'd it to Bachmann), and no spare parts. 

It did not have a chuff trigger, and it also refuses to work over about 20 volts DCC, so it was not real popular.

Luckily, the QSI combination decoder came out and I could go there.

In late 2008, Soundtraxx obsoleted their Sierra sound decoder, which was very popular with battery guys in large scale.

There is some rumor that something great is in the works, but I'm not getting excited, since it's been years with no delivery on the LS Tsunami.

Apparently, since SoundTraxx was commissioned to make a board to fit a specific version of the Shay that was sent to them from Bachmann.

As production continues, changes often occur, and apparently since the contract with SoundTraxx did not include support, Bachmann tests every loco, and if the sound unit does not work, they pull it out and sell the loco as "straight DC". Of course now the box is mis-marked as having DCC and sound.

There's a number of people who have ordered DCC/Sound 3 truck Shays, and got DC only versions with no sound. So, that's an explanation of what has been happening.

So, when discount houses buy old stock from failing hobby shops, they just look at the box, and sell it for what the box says.

Other Tsunami notes:

Factory reset: set CV30 = 2. Apparently the lights on the decoder will flash 16 times

The SoundTraxx Sierra

This is a DC only sound board for large scale. It went out of production in 2009.

I will be adding some documentation here for legacy purposes.

The sierra was designed to work on DC... trying to run it on PWM (as output from most decoders) causes a number of problems.

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