@harmonyards posted:I’d agree with Mario & John on this one, ….I’d play around with the speakers first before messing around with sound cards,…..listen to Mario’s sound clip from his early 2.5 sound card from his CV, ….I’m dually impressed and plan to follow suit on an upcoming unnamed project using a 2.5 sound card….you’ve got 3.0, so you might be impressed just getting rid of the crackly background noises….
Pat
The changes between RailSounds 2.5, 3 and 4 were hardware based. RS2.5 is the one-piece board, RS3 splits the RS2.5 into audio and power boards (plus a motherboard to connect everything) and then RS4 is a more efficient version of the RS3 system.
But the sound-producing software (contained in the two socketed chips) only changed incrementally during those years, and the chips are fully compatible between RS2.5 and 4.0. My point in mentioning this is you can put the same set of sound chips into each of the three different hardware systems and they'll pretty much sound identical.
The background artifacts were because of file compression necessary to fit into the smaller chips of the late 1990s. This improved a lot with the release of RS4E ("enhanced") circa 2002-2003 that used chips with more memory, which greatly reduced the "crackly background" noises you can hear. Note that the boards used for RS4E are identical to those from RS4 -- only the chipset is different. Be careful when using upgraded speakers with some of the older systems. Some sound great, and some seem to amplify all those compression artifacts!
Lastly, I agree that the sound set used for that first Commodore Vanderbilt is one of the best from early RailSounds.
TRW
