Hey Mike,
Additionally there is this part of the early history (we've talked about this before)...................
There was a meeting between Dick Kughn and his team and Bill Benson and his team to discuss technology sharing. Part of Bill's demo to Dick was having me show the digital audio I had developed for RoW. This involved a circuit with whistle, bell, and chuff. Rather than buy technology from RoW, Dick has his engineers locate a sound chip producer in California to make masked sound chips. In conversation with Mike Ledyard (then VP of engineering at Lionel) at York, he said Lionel had to buy 20,000 of each chip at a few dollars each to build their boards. What I had was a programmable memory and a sound processor so I could change sounds easily.
Lionel's early sound chips had whistle and bell on one IC and chuff and blowdown on another. They did sound good; they're in the PRR B-6. And I am also not sure if they did diesel sounds.
Prior that the Sound of Steam board had chuff and whistle, both synthesized, not digital.
Lou N
WoK
P.S. Mike, that's a great dissertation above!
