Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

[EchoWars]

After see-sawing for a time between the Phillips Acoustic Edge and the TB Santa Cruz, ended up getting the Santa Cruz. Since I am dual-booting Win98SE and Win2k, I figured it would be a pretty good 'test' of drivers and stability.

Hat Damn! Win2k makes noises now! (Hardly a glowing recommendation, agreed, but it's been silent for so long now anything is welcome...) The included apps, Audiostation4 (a media player), MIDI Orchestrator 32, and AudioView 32 (an audio waveform editor), do not work in Win2k. I don't do much with MIDI, and I use Sound Forge for waveform editing, so this is no big hurt.

Audiostation4 had already brought down Win98SE a couple of times (one on install and another on software update), but began behaving itself after a couple of reboots. I shall regard it with a wary eye for the time being. Since it seems to be not a lot more than a skinned Media Player 7 (which I kinda like anyway , I probably won't see it that much.

Overall sound quality seems to be on par with the Aureal 8830 (May that Beloved Appendage RIP), but the effects in Half-Life cannot compare. However, I've got a reasonable facsimile, and it's not made by Creative, sooooo..

Haven't had a chance yet to experiment much with the Versajack, but I expect that I may be wearing my headphones a bit more often...what this card does with effects seems to work particularly well with two speakers next to the ears...and everybody bitches at me for playing my games too loud anyway, so I might give 'em a break.

I find it surprising that I haven't read more about anyone on the MURC forums using this card...but then again, I doubt anyone else was as desperate for a soundcard as I found myself.

We'll have to see how the card does under close examination and a bit of extended use.

[EchoWars]

A little but of it might be attributed to the 'rats abandoning a sinking ship' syndrome. Drivers are now fixed, and there are a lot of driver update junkies out there that can't stand the thought of being stuck with the driver package frozen. The 8830 works just peachy in Win98, but driver problems, albeit minor (card won't wake up from suspend) start to appear in WinME, and in W2k you can pretty much forget it unless you are running a BX chipset, and even then it's iffy. I know MY two systems (Epox EP-MVP3C2 SS7 and Abit KT7 T-Bird VIA systems) refuse to function in W2k with the 8830 cards, although the SS7 is now running just fine with a 8810...go figure.
If you plan on using Win98 for a while, and/or are willing to put up with the card not waking up in WinMill (disable standby), you could hang on to the 8830 card for quite a while longer. But the writing is on the wall, and that makes some people jumpy.
BTW, the Santa Cruz DOES have an internal S/PDIF connector. Being internal, it might not be extremely convenient, but recording is still possible from it, and rigging up an external connector shouldn't be a huge deal. I have no other digital sources, so I shan't miss it.