Our big news this week is, of course, a two-syllable word that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the near future. We’re making a lot of noise about Nexus  – because the noises Nexus makes are pretty special. But what’s the thinking behind the noise?

The Nexus story began three years ago, on a late summer’s evening in deepest North Yorkshire. Our now-famous Black 5 was nearing completion and had been pounding our test track clocking up some serious mileage. Sound-fitted Black 5s are equipped with a top-quality decoder, speakers and bespoke sound file that make them the envy of many an O-Gauge ‘kettle’. But having spent a lot of time hanging out with the real thing, we started to realize that something was…missing.

All digital decoders up until now have used a single channel to reproduce their sounds. But when you play sound through a single channel, all the sounds will come from all your speakers, wherever they are. So on a steam engine, if you have a speaker in the boiler, then the sound of the tender being filled with water or coal being shovelled in the cab will come from – the boiler. If you’ve a speaker in the tender, then the chuff and hiss of the engine will also come from the tender! Which doesn’t really make sense, but it’s what we’d all become used to.

We were making ultra-realistic models with great 'sounding' noises but with no direction to the sound. So there and then, over strong tea and curd tart, we pledged that anything we made in the future that made noise would make dual-channel noise. Sounds that faded and modulated – from one part of a model to another – became our holy grail. And when we set ourselves a quest, we leave no stone unturned, no battle unfought, no terrifying cave unexplored to ensure we not only complete the quest but that the prize glitters with perfection. We don’t do ‘almost’.

We’re lucky enough to have some of the industry’s finest design and electrical minds on our team, but when it came to the nuts and bolts of actually making decoders, we needed a partner. Especially since these decoders would not only have to do something completely new but be constructed to next-generation standards using components several leagues above what was already available.

Working with an award-winning electronics company, we brainstormed, experimented, tested, went back to the drawing board several times and generally scienced the sh*t out of our latest crusade. It hurt. 

But we did it.

Three years later, our OO Gauge Austerities and O and OO Guage Pugs will be the industry’s first models to feature stunningly authentic dual-channel audio. It's the reason we kept shtum about prices and specs for our next sound fitted models: we knew that each of them would have a Nexus heart in its chest, and we weren't about to unveil it until we were confident that those hearts would beat perfectly.

Perhaps best of all, Nexus is designed, manufactured and supported in the UK – another industry first for such components.

If you want to get to grips with Nexus tech, you can explore its specs and capabilities here. If you’d rather book your ticket to audio nirvana with a nexus-fitted model, make sure you pre-order one of our Austerities or Pugs today.