Don't own any Digitrax sound decoders, and wasn't referring to a sound decoders. I own lots of regular Digitrax as well as TCS, some Zimo, and ESU. The Motor control and Lighting work quite well in all these decoders. My guess is you just don't know how to install and program a Digitrax decoder.
Your guess would be wrong. I've had dozens of Digitrax decoders, and ended up replacing them all because of the above reasons.
Received mine a week ago, and experienced a number of quality issues on the shell - the engine itself is running smooth and the LokSound decoder doing the job. a front handrail keeps falling down - not a big issue, but will have to glue it. a quite visible painting default on the body - missing black paint on two spots. Again, not complicated to fix, but not to be expected for a model of that price. the front headlight was hardly visible. I was able to fix the issue by removing one small piece inside the shell that was supposed to guide light but was masking it due to poor adjustment a major issue with the rear platform being bended upwards to the point that the coupler is too high making it impossible to couple any car behind! This makes a lot. I already had some disappointment with Intermountain models in the past, but I was expecting this model to be impeccable considering the level of detail and pricing. Such default should never had gone through a decent quality control. So is it me with bad luck, or anyone else reporting similar defaults? The coupler "too high" has been reported already in this thread, but not to the point to be unusable.
Defaults? Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." (Sorry, this is immediately what I thought of reading the post. )
I meant "faults" or "flaws" or "defects". Sorry this was a too direct transposition from French "défaut" which would better translate into one of the words enumerated at the beginning of this response. Thank you for highlighting my approximation with humor.
MY UP model from the inspection I performed seemed to be in rather nice shape-I do agree with bend of the chassis upwards. I actually attempted to do some softening and brought it down a slight bit, connector works fine but is a tad over height. Now after I was doing some testing on the new layout (in progress) I stooped down and my back hit another extension of my layout and with all the luck in the world tipped the train off the track (14 cars) and wouldn't you know it only the SD-40-2 fell to the concrete floor - 42" drop/\/\/\/\/\ my heart stopped. Well picked up the pieces and went into micro repair-1) body separated from flooring 2) 90% of handrails knocked loose 3) trucks blew apart 4) Cab separated 5) one wiper was never to be found 6) not one bit of damage to the motor, decoder, wiring and such. After 3 days of painstaking repair-worst part was the deck flooring actually split from the shell and took some serious repair to recover I finally got it back together and ran a test run. Not a problem at all and runs fine.
Sorry you had bad luck with them, but if they were truly as bad as you say there wouldn't wouldn't be so many people satisfied with them.
I'm rather picky about my decoders. I'm sure there are thousands of people out there that are satisfied. Good for them. That's great. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.