Leading In
The last few months have brought with them some sweeping changes to the sound card market in the form of cards that handle 6 speaker output. Aureal and Creative battled it out during the era when quadraphonic sound was king, and though Aureal is now gone, the struggle in the sound card market continues on. By now youre familiar with Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1 series of cards (thanks to their marketing blitzkrieg), and weve already seen Philips poster boy, the Acoustic Edge. Now make way for the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, twin to UK based VideoLogics Sonic Fury.
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| Box Shot, and Box's Contents |
Over the years, Turtle Beach has made a name for itself in the audio industry and today they are fairly well known as a respectable sound card manufacturer. The Santa Cruz is based on the Crystal CS4630 SoundFusion Digital Signal Processor chip --Crystal is of course a division of the long time chip manufacturer, Cirrus Logic, and the SoundFusion chip is part of a fairly long line of audio chips that they have been responsible for. The basic specs of the CS4630 put it on even ground against the SBLive 5.1 series and the Philips Thunderbird Avenger chips. All the standard gaming APIs such as A3D 1.0, EAX 1.0/2.0, IA3D are supported, along with Sensauras MacroFX, MultiDrive, and Virtual Ear. The DSP is capable of accelerating 32 hardware DirectSound3D streams and an additional 16 DS3D software streams with your host CPU. The chip is also designed to offload MP3 decoding from the host CPU, and accelerates, in hardware, 100% of the EQ effects applied to sound streams.
Setting it Up, and Getting it On
The sound card installs relatively easily. The physical connection options are the best I have ever seen, period. As with all the other quad capable speakers, there are front and rear outputs plus mic and line inputs. However, the Santa Cruz also has another connector called the VersaJack. The aptly named jack can be software set to output the center channel in a 5.1 setup, output a digital stream, act as another line out, or function as a secondary stereo line input and all these changes can be done on the fly! It may not sound like much on paper, but one example of its use could be as a headphones out jack, even if you had already occupied the front and rear channels with your quad speaker setup. At home I have a Vortex2 card with a quad speaker setup, and to use headphones I am always having to unplug the rear line out a huge hassle.
Other reviewers and users have found the driver stability to be the weakest part of the product, and I tend to agree. I did most of my testing in a Win9X environment, and for the most part the drivers performed properly, but several times the system froze up on me as I was fooling around with the reverb effects in the control panel. A few more times during my testing, the system either locked up during a game, or a game would boot me right out without warning or error messages.
Upgrading to the latest driver revision was a hassle and did NOT occur as per the directions in the given readme files. After upgrading I couldnt even enable the MP3 acceleration feature any more, and the systray icon became disabled permanently. I ended up reinstalling the whole sound card from scratch, and still could not get the systray icon to display properly. In spite of all efforts, I was never able to get a small handful of games of games to run properly with the Santa Cruz installed (Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 being one of those titles
DAMN).
In spite of the stability problems and my continued lack of success in getting the control panel access to show up on the systray, the control panel itself is very slick and well made. All changes made in the control panel occur in real time, so that if you change an EQ setting, add reverb, or switch listening modes while playing some music, all changes are heard immediately.
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