Is DCC sound really required?


Well my Lionel made sound in the fifties and it was really cool! My N gauge in the sixties and seventies was silent and meh!

My HO in eighties and since has been silent, but more and more HO railroads I operate on have sound and getting more of it.

So my answer is you don't need sound, but in the right setup it can enhance your experience. If you want to be prototypical and blow the whistle for crossings and ring the bell in the yard and such, sound is cool!
 
I regularly operate on another layout with sound equipped locomotives. Whistles at crossings, bells approaching stations add a nice element. However some features (which can be turned off) I find distracting to the point of being annoying. Radio calls from the cab, air receivers blowing down, locomotive engines starting, etc. I own three Athearn BB locos that were DCC equipped in 1993 before sound, the directional lighting and strobe atop the cab are good enough.
 
With my sound engines, I turn the volume way down, to the point it is barely audible from more than 5 feet away or so. Of course, the layout is in a pretty small space, so in my case, less is more.
 
Sound on model locos is kind of like crack... except the first one is never free. ;)

When I was finally able to get seriously into the hobby, all my locos were DC and silent. As I went to DCC, the sound was intriguing. After my first sound loco I was hooked. I run sound most of the time, but every now and then I leave it off just to watch the trains go by and hear the clickity-clack on some of my more open track connections.

Is it REALLY NEEDED to enjoy the hobby? No.
Do I enjoy it? Yes... most of the time. 😌
 
I'll usually turn the sound off after 10 mins, it's a neat feature but when running multiple trains I find it annoying after that.
 
Sound is it needed? Of course not.

I love the sounds of it all, the start up, the brakes, the air hissing, the rumble of the diesel engine. But volume is important. I keep the bell and the horn on the low side of volume. I especially enjoy sound while switching which is also my favorite thing to do.

My wife occasionally will pop into the train room to operate with me. More often she’ll stop in to just have a conversation. As low as I think the volume is, she hates it. With her hearing aides she tells me it sounds like high volume static. Everyone is different.
 
I should add I have a few sound equipped reefer cars that will drive you to madness after five and a half minutes or so.
They are cool but all turned way down, you shouldn’t hear them a scale mile away anyhow.
 
I do not have any sound equipped stuff and would rather not have that going on. I like the sound of the wheels on the rails, especially going over small gaps and getting the clickety sound Airbrush mentioned.

Totally a matter of personal preference.

Dave LASM
 
Sounds helps me to flesh out the illusion I seek when playing with my trains. HO scale sound has improved considerably since my first DCC/sound loco, a BLI Hudson in Toronto,Hamilton & Buffalo livery with the QSI decoders of the day (I still have at least six QSI decoders operating, all with the upgraded chip after MTH lost its suit against BLI for patent infringement on PWM and BEMF modulation for low speed control).

Factory default sounds and decoder motion control are awful. No inertia, no momentum, as examples, and the sounds are very close to maximum. This sounds horrible. So, what most of us learn to do, is to mute the Master Volume by around 50-70%, and to alter the motion control CVs so that our engines labour, screech brakes, and slow just like the real items. The sound is vastly improved. For example, I tone down the blow-down and pop-off and injector sounds because they're annoying. In fact, I try to limit myself to any two of my locomotives making sounds at any one time, whether they're idle, one running and the other idle, or both running. I can tolerate that level of sound mix and volume.

You MUST set your Master Volume CV to a middle setting, and adjust others as you need to. This is because sound does not scale on our model layouts any more than smoke or water do. There's no point in having two factory-default sound decoders barking out chuffs from two locomotives that are at opposite ends of a layout that is meant to represent several miles of separation. It's different in the yard, but out on the mains, you should have low volume in the normal operating sounds of any kind of locomotive, diesel or not. You can adjust bells up and down, horns and whistles up and down, but keeping the chuffs and chugs down will really help with attending to, and enjoying, the actions and sounds of the locomotive you are actively working with.
 
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