Post your questions and comments on the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard review.

__________________
ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Hmm, pretty decent review except for one major oversight. The Philips Acoustic Edge does NOT use the same chip as the Santa Cruz does.
The Philips sound card uses the socalled "Thunderbird DSP" as it's main processor, not the Cirrus Logic chip used in the Santa Cruz, the GameTheater XP and the Sonic Fury soundcards.
The Thunderbird is manufactured by a company called VLSI that was bought by Philips some time ago.
Just thought I should point that out.

Regards

Ian

From what i have seen and read in other reviews i thought it was the same chip. Anyway great review on the Santa Cruz. Most people that review cards only use the out of the box drivers and not the latest drivers from a manufacturer, which as most people know can cause biased reviews. Something else i would like to point out is that Turtle Beach was the 1st company to produce XP compatible sound drivers and continue to produce and tweak driver revisions more so than other companies. IE Creative labs, who only seem to care about the bottom line and not their customers.

Unregistered (1), hehe, you might be right, Im researching this right now but so far found out that the Accoustic Edge uses the ThunderBird Avenger-SAA7785 PCI audio chip, I'm trying to find any connections to the Cirrus Logic chip. Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate how you didn't bash me like some people would.

Unregistered (2), thanks for the positive comments on the review, I found that using the latest drivers is always a good thing.

Not only does the Acoustic Edge use a different DSP, it uses an altogether different way of interpreting and processing DirectSound 3D information.

The Cirrus Logic DSP uses Sensaura (the name of an independent company in England) to process DS3D and the Thunderbird uses QSound (I think they may be part of Philips). One clear advantage of QSound is its ability to upmix stereo audio streams (like background music) to 5.1 channels making a good blend of stereo and 3D audio. Turtle Beach seams to stupidly (based on my own preliminary testing) reproduce some of the stereo info in the rear channels, at a lower volume than the front (it would be better off with no sound in the rear) whilst doing a stereo*2 on wav streams and CD audio when in 4 speaker mode.
Sensaura's advantage and biggest claim to fame is its ability to render 3D effects on headphones. Qsound claims to be able to reproduce 3D adio effect on 3 speakers but Mark of 3Dsoundsurge says its headphone rendering is the worst of the three main competitors. The headphone thing is important for people who use prosumer headphones - they sound a hell of a lot better than any "multimedia" speakers (except probably the Sirocco Pro) and are less expensive.

An extensive comparison of these two competing formats and their advantages and disadvantes would be good.

Nevertheless - this card rocks! No driver issues with any Windows version and a fair price makes it my recommended card for all gamers...

I am getting all kinds of GPF's, BSOD's, and errors because Turtle Beach is not updating their Windows 9x drivers. I believe for newer hardware, they are out of date. While viewing DVD's ported to my TV, if I click around too much in the Santa Cruz Control Panel (SCCP), it will GPF on me. This also occurs while simply listening to MP3's. When the SCCP GPF's, it turns into a white box which stays on my DeskTop. The SCCP button remains on the TaskBar. When I press CTRL-ALT-DEL, the SCCP is not there. The only way to remove the white box and TaskBar button is to reboot. Sometimes just clicking on the Equalizer tab will give me a GPF. Below are the 2 errors which occur together in succession.

I reinstalled using their downloaded web drivers. I still got the GPF's and BSOD's. After reinstalling their drivers 3 times, I emailed their tech support. They told me Santa Cruz cannot share IRQ's. I moved it to another slot so it does not share an IRQ and reinstalled a 4th time but it still GPF's.

I bought their Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card expecting to buy the best on the market or at least equal to the Sound Blaster Live product line. I called Turtle Beach and they said they are no longer updating their Windows 9x drivers. If a user upgrades his hardware such as a motherboard, video card, etc..., and he keeps a Windows 9x O/S (98, 98SE), their Win9x drivers will be out of date. Their last Win9x drivers are dated Jan 15, 2001. If you upgrade your hardware but keep a Windows 9x O/S, buy a sound card manufactured by another company. I do not recommend Santa Cruz in Windows 2K/XP either because it will probably share an IRQ. I am very disappointed with Santa Cruz.

Daniel


This is my system built November, 2001. I do NOT have ACPI enabled in Windows 98(1):
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Windows 98(1);
AMD Athlon TBird 1400/266 MHz;
Thermalright SK6 all copper heatsink w/Arctic Silver II;
Thermaltake TT-6025A-2B 4.5K RPM, 21 CFM, 28 dBA fan;
Abit KG7-RAID (RAID not enabled);
2 - Crucial 256 MB DDR ECC Memory;
Asus V7700 Deluxe GeForce 2 GTS 64 MB w/Video (TV) In/Out;
Panasonic S17 17" Monitor;
Promise Ultra66 IDE PCI Controller card;
2 - 30 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM;
Lite-On 12x10x32 w/Burn Proof CD-RW;
Toshiba DVD-ROM 16x;
Mitsumi 12x CD-ROM;
Mitsubishi LS-120 IDE 120/1.44 MB Floppy;
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card?????;
US Robotics 56K Performance Pro PCI Modem;
Enermax 430 Watt Whisper PSU;
Case Mid-Tower, ChenMing, Model ATX-601AE
w/Front & Side Door, 2 intake & 2 exhaust fans
http://chieftec.com/products/dragon/dx01wd.htm
(Same as ChiefTec Dragon DX-01WD case)
(Same as Antec SX1030/SX1040 case w/o Antec PSU);
(Same as Maxpoint/Enermax FS-710 case);
Epson Stylus Color 980 USB Printer;
Epson Perfection 1250 USB Scanner;
Belkin F5U116 USB Hub with 4 USB, 1 Printer, & 2 Serial Ports;
PK Electronics 500VA Blackout Buster UPS (connected to monitor and printer);
PK Electronics 1,000VA Blackout Buster UPS (connected to PC case);
************************************************** ********************


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SantaCruzCPL
An error has occurred in your program. To keep working anyway click Ignore and save your work in a new file. To quit this program, click Close. You will lose information you entered since your last save.
[CLOSE] [IGNORE]
************************************************** ********************
Date 01/02/2002 Time 10:58am
SANTACRUZCPL caused a general protection fault
in module MMSYSTEM.DLL at 0001:000002d3.
Registers:
EAX=c29b0006 CS=1b67 EIP=000002d3 EFLGS=00000246
EBX=006d0018 SS=3997 ESP=00000fbe EBP=00000fe4
ECX=006d0001 DS=2c5f ESI=00003988 FS=1097
EDX=00018590 ES=0000 EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
26 66 ff 06 18 00 66 26 ff 36 20 00 9a 63 03 67
Stack dump:
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This is the text of the occasional BSOD I get when I click on the Equalizer tab in the Santa Cruz Control Panel. It is not 100% reproducible:
************************************************** ********************
A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C001EC2C. The current application will be terminated.

*Press any key to terminate the current application.
*Press Ctrl+Alt+Del again to restart your computer.
************************************************** ********************

This Turtle Beach Santa Cruz souncard is shit!




This card has great potential, however the software for control panel, (either on the disk or latest release from Voyetra), is total crap. I have re-installed the Drivers at least 30 times. The soundcheck feature crashes, Change any setting and blue screens, Saving presets doesn't work, at one point I had 6 icons for control panel in the tray, total garbage. I should mention that my system is totally clean of any other soundcard drivers or pieces, right down to the registry. The "support" has been typical with responses like, " re-install your operating system". Yeh...isn't that passing the buck. It's not my OS, it's this shitty untested less than Beta quality software. I have removed the card, and taken this as a lesson. Don't buy this card unless you have plenty of capacity for frustration!

I have a turble beach santa cruz sound card on my computer. I am about to format my drive, last time I had to do this, I had to enter a pathway in order to reinstall my sound card. Is there any kind of patch available or do I have to continue to use the pathway? Desi

Have you tried the most RECENT drivers from Turtle Beach's website?

__________________
ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

i have a turtle beach sound card and its the shits i love it good job turtle beach

It just seems to me that if someone is complaining about the card not running well on a Windows 9x OS, they might want to consider upgrading to XP. To begin with, the 9x series is notoriously unstable (and don't get me started on Windows ME...). XP is built on the very stable Windows 2000 kernel, and BSODs are rare. Granted, it isn't a Mac, and you still can't leave your computer on for days, but then again, how long does it really take to just restart your computer first thing in the morning? If you don't have tons of stuff running in the background that has to restart each time you reboot the PC (check your System Tray, and then check your Task Manager's Process tab to see what all is running when you have no open applications and have shut down background stuff like firewalls, instant messenging programs, on-screen applications for your video card, etc.), Windows XP will boot and be fully up and running, and not taxing your hard drive, in less than a minute.

The card runs really well on XP, and I haven't had any problems. I'm not even sitting with a reasonable speaker set up, just two desktops and their subwoofer. What the card does with just that is nothing short of amazing. Load up Neverwinter Nights, if you're a PC gamer, and then turn your character around, and listen to the sound pan with your rotation.

You'd do well to purchase this card. And if you're still on 9x... upgrade! Geez, we're getting closer and closer to Longhorn, and then XP is going to be "old-school"!