DCC Sound Chips

[ajcooper4]

I asked a question elsewhere but, unusually, no replies so far. Just wondered if anyone had purchased locos from Hattons with the Olivia's sound chip installed and how they had found it please. I am not sure whether to buy the loco and then the chip from, say youchoos, or just let Hatton's do it this time.

Grateful for any thoughts please. Many thanks.

[Forfarian]

Try buying a loco with a decoder, Hatton's "chips" are cold and soggy.

[Hound Dog]

I have a Heljan class 27 diesel which I bought second hand on e-bay and it has an Olivia’s sound chip installed and it is very good........ not quite in the same league as my SLW Class 24, but at almost a third of the cost it is good enough for my purposes.

Hope this helps

[Paul-H]

How much are Hattons adding for sound, if a little more than £100 it might be worth letting them do it for your first sound model, if a lot more than £100 then it's probably worth doing it yourself, sound decoders with speaker comes in at around £110, some models are easier than others to fit sound, than others, what's the model you are thinking of getting.

Paul

[ajcooper4]

Thanks for the replies. I have a Hornby County Class into which I successfully installed a youchoos chip and sugar cube speaker. I also hotglued the wires on top of the chip as they are thin and fragile and easily removed from their solder. All works well.

I planned to buy a GWR pannier tank (Bachmann) from Hatton's Basic loco is about £90 but with Olivia's sound chip installed total cost rises to £226 - ouch.

[Paul-H]

One thing I would watch out for is, there have been reports on other forums that people have found that whoever is doing the work at Hattons has the reputation for being a bit ham fisted with quite a few reports of trapped or shorting wires.

The Bachmann Pannier if dcc ready should be quite simple to add sound to yourself so only costing £110 for the sound addition.

Paul

[Pannier Tank]

I have fitted sound to several Bachmann Pannier tanks. I use Youchoos sound (Zimmo decoder and sugar cube). I removed part of the cab floor on the locos and the sugar cube then fit nicely.

Great sound quality and fairly easy to fit.

There is an instillation guide on Youchoos website for this model.

Hope this helps, John

[Richard Croft]

I wouldn’t recommend the hattons fitting service. It’s not really what they are known for. Their aim is to get the sound fitted to the models quickly and then move onto the next model. Go to a DCC specialist.

I fit sound for a living and sometimes get sent hattons fitted models to improve. The last one was a class 92 which is quite an old model so has tons of space inside, the speaker they had chosen was a 28mm round speaker, without a sound chamber and it was black tacked to the roof. It sounded terrible.

Richard