What siren models do you find to be overrated/underappreciated?

[NewEnglander1212]

Hey, guys. I just did a forum search on this particular subject matter, but I couldn't find any threads on it. With that said, what model do you think is either underappreciated or overrated? For me, I think Whelen's products sound absolutely terrifying at a distance, and even Federal's 2001s can be downright scary at times, like Chicago's system.

[OwenLester]

I have to agree with you on the Whelens and 2001s. They can both sound absolutely terrifying.

For overrated sirens, I find the EOWS sirens (particularly the EOWS-612) to be quite overrated. Never liked how they sounded, nor have I ever understood the hype for them. Thats all I really have for overrated, I’ll probably think of more later.

Back to underrated sirens, I gotta say most of Federal Signal’s newest electro-mechanical sirens. I never see much people talk about the 508 and the Eclipse-8. Although the 508 has a… not so pretty design to say the least, both that and the Eclipse-8 are pretty dang cool. Im a bit of a sucker for 8-Port sirens. Maybe they are talked about and I could just be living under a rock aha.

[ArxCyberwolf]

I find B&M to be heavily underappreciated. The unique curved rotor vanes their sirens use give them insane performance for their size due to their high efficiency, as well as being built almost entirely with their own fabricated parts to ensure high quality. According to other enthusiasts who I've talked to that have heard B&M's sirens, both large and small, they're incredibly loud compared to other sirens of the same or similar size and horsepower. Even small sirens such as the 6GA and 10GA are ear-splittingly loud and run at over 10K RPM! They also had unique port ratios such as 14/16, 8/10, and 6/8.

Most fascinatingly (to me at least) they came up with a genius way of getting more performance out of their sirens by using "half-ported" rotors on some models. What this means is that the rotor has half the number of ports of the stator (such as a 6 port rotor in a 12 port stator), which results in only a quarter of the stator ports being open at any given time. This massively increased air pressure through the ports, and made the sirens much, much louder. Combined with the highly efficient curved vanes, these sirens were absolute monsters. I feel that in terms of omnidirectional, non-rotating sirens, B&M had everyone else beat in sheer performance.

B&M still makes vehicular sirens, which are so much better than anything else on the market. Heck, Federal even copied their curved rotor designs for the Q back in the 50s and it still doesn't hold a candle to B&M's sirens like the Super Chief because the Q has no intake nor projector and can't build as much sound pressure. Plus B&M's quality is still significantly higher due to their sirens not being made with outsourced Chinese parts that rapidly wear out.