Installation

The Turtle Beach doesn't use Aureal's reference drivers either. They have come up with their own set of drivers, based upon Aureal's. Unfortunately, since board manufacturers' drivers are almost always based heavily on reference drivers nowadays (especially for new functionality), we fear that Turtle Beach will always be somewhat lagging behind Aureal in terms of beta and production driver release.

My Drivers are better than yours:

While the reference drivers may not work perfectly with the Montego II, Turtle Beach knows not to mess with a good thing, as the driver control panels of the Montego II and the Aureal drivers are very similar., The Montego II does feature a much-welcomed rear-volume control on the control panel, but most everything else remains the same (which is a good thing). Whether this similarity in interface extends to the behind the scenes action remains to be seen.

One disadvantage of the incompatibility with reference drivers is that the newest beta drivers from Aureal cannot be used reliably and indeed, I did experience some unusual icon and SPDIF glitches when using the reference drivers. For best or for worst, Turtle Beach is in effect, enforcing its users to use only the most stable drivers that have been thoroughly been tested by them. It's your choice, speedy release of performance-enhancing products, or solid, custom-designed hardware that requires a little factory-extra finessing on software drivers.

The newest beta drivers from Aureal have given the Vortex2 virtually the same minuscule CPU usage in ZD's Audio Winbench test that the SB Live!'s have had. This goes to tell you how much difference a set of drivers can make.