MRC decoders are widely distributed in most hobby shops that carry many fine MRC products.
Unfortunately MRC was very late getting into the DCC market. More specifically, they came to the sound decoder market very late. With the introduction of these products, they have a lot of bells and whistle so to speak on the outside, but under the hood, there is not much there and what is there sometime does not follow the NMRA DCC standards. Pretty on the outside by limited brains on the inside.
Since the first release of MRC sound decoders, many new series of decoder have been released. Unfortunately, they have not caught up to the level of sound decoder performance that MRC competators have offered from the start. Each MRC release of a new sound decoder series is an improvement in catching up. But it begs the question as to WHY can't MRC just focus on catching up 100% first and then build up from there.
EXAMPLES OF KNOWN MRC SOUND DECODER PROBLEMS
Not all versions of MRC decoder have ALL of these problems. It depends on which generation of MRC decoder you have. This has lead to confusion in the market place regardind how well the decoder works. Some say I have no problem while other say they do. The problem is the decoder feature playing field is not level or even. So two people both owning MRC decoders but both are many generations apart will have very different opinions. The other part of the problem is the feature set the do offer is often less the competitor decoder offers. MRC owners may have no idea what they are missing if they never tried the other brands of DCC sound decoders. Ignorance is bliss sort of thing.
Below is a partial list of known MRC decoder problems:
1) No programming track support.
2) Limited to no CV programmable volume level support.
3) Violates NMRA DCC Standards regarding CV assignments and/or value ranges.
4) Violates NMRA DCC Standards regarding advanced Function Control Support.
5) Stalls on dirty track and forces the train to wait until it runs the "Start The Engine" sequence.