Turtle Beach's Santa Cruz Card

The Concert

Next up on the list of booth's to visit was Turtle Beach. When I arrived, I stumbled upon a concert they were conducting for the audience. While walking through the crowd I felt like holding up a lighter or a candle! Note to self: Next time when visiting an audio companies' booth, always have a lighter handy. In any case, once a quiet spot was found, it was time to discuss Turtle Beach's upcoming products.

The Santa Cruz

Continuing their tradition of naming cards after cities with beautiful names, Turtle Beach's next product, the Santa Cruz, was the main topic of discussion. Scheduled to ship in spring 2000, the Santa Cruz will sticker for an aggressive price tag of $100. Like the SQ3500 Turbo, the Santa Cruz has a separate DSP and decodes Dolby Digital and MP3 in hardware. Unlike the SQ3500, the Santa Cruz is a "true" Dolby Digital 5.1 setup. Not only does the Santa Cruz decode MP3's and Dolby Digital in hardware, the plan is to accelerate all audio on the Santa Cruz board! With their multi-function DSP, you can potentially allocate an unlimited number of MIDI voices or adjust DirectSound3D streams. With the included Audio Station 2000 software and its Jukebox Management System, users can rip MP3's or burn CD's to your hearts content!

Since Turtle Beach isn't using Aureal's sound processor in the Santa Cruz, we were a little concerned with its API compatibility. Fortunately, we were assured that the Santa Cruz would be EAX and A3D 1.0 compatible. While I'm discussing compatibility, like the SQ3500 Turbo, the Santa Cruz features multiple HRTF sets for adjusting the sound for your ear. We're glad Aureal and Turtle Beach are including this feature with their new sound cards, as it's something the industry has needed with sound playing an increasing role in the gameplay experience. And with DVD's and Dolby Digital becoming more important everyday, we hope to see the other major audio player, Creative Labs, follow their lead.

What other features does it support?

In the other cool features department, the Santa Cruz will offer the standard collection of jacks: line-in, microphone-in, front/rear speaker connections, a game/MIDI port, and the last connector being a "versi" jack. With the versi jack, users have four different options to choose from: headphone out, 5.1 output for use with a center channel speaker, S/PDIF out, or a second line input. Internally, the Santa Cruz will offer a daughterboard connector (for optical inputs and outputs) and a S/PDIF-in connector.

Finally, the Santa Cruz offers echo cancellation. Users who have experienced this unwanted noise during video conferencing sessions will definitely appreciate this feature. The Santa Cruz will ship with 3 different software bundles, one for business users, another for audio professionals, and of course one for us gamers. The Santa Cruz will sell for $100, a great price in our book!