I'm no apologist for Digitrax, but experience shows you must have adequate capacitors for their sound decoders. Finding space for them is as important as the speakers themselves. It's too bad they released the product with 1. A speaker that won't fit in most N scale engines 2. The first batch came with a huge capacitor, not attached, that wouldn't fit in most HO engines, let alone N 3. A "phase 2" release of the same decoder with a smaller but still too large capacitor attached, but the decoder diagram mislabelled. 4. A lack of honesty about the absolute need for capacitors 5. A lack of admission that the design is seriously underpowered re the slowing down issue (which is very annoying). 6. Many of their downloadable sound files are quite "raw", still 8 bit (even MRC has gone to 16 bit sound) and require a lot of sound editing, sound like crap if used directly-most of us aren't audio engineers/programmers and rewriting code is not necessarily how we want to spend our hobby time. On the other hand, I have yet to come across a Digitrax sound decoder that was "bad" in the sense it was damaged or defective out of the package. You can say it's bad by design and you would be somewhat correct. They had problems years ago going to lead-free solder but that doesn't seem to be a problem anymore.
