Great in the Right Machine
Written: Jul 03 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great sound, every feature you could want
Cons: Does NOT run under Win2k
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| aerobrick's Full Review: Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio |
Let me start off by saying that I LIKE Turtle Beach's products. We've got a couple of Montego A3D Extremes around here. They're good performers and produce great quality sound.
I wish I could say the same about the Montego II Home Studio. I recently tried, and tried... and TRIED (spending a large portion of two full days) to get this board to work in my system, to no avail. Not that my system is exactly "run-of-the-mill". A dual PII-450 system running Win2k in 256MB of RAM on an IWill DBL100 motherboard with all SCSI peripherals; this isn't exactly your off-the-shelf home PC.
The Home Studio looked like a good deal for me, because of its digital interfaces. I was hoping to be able to use it to connect to my minidisc recorder and create lots of direct-digital disks, as well as pick up on the enhancements over the original Montego with its earlier Aureal chipset.
Unfortunately, Turtle Beach has entirely missed the boat on Win2k. Once known for being cutting-edge for their support of Windows NT (which is what I originally purchased the Montego A3d Extreme to run with), their support of Win2k proves to be non-existent.
Although a procedure is given on the Turtle Beach web site for installing their supplied NT drivers under Win2k, this procedure did not work. (I've got over 20 years experience in computers and electronics, so I doubt that I didn't understand what needed to be done). The Microsoft included WIN2k drivers for this chipset will run the basic board, but you'll lose out on all the extra features of the Home Studio version. You may as well have saved some $$$ and bought the straight Montego II.
The final blow that lead to my returning the board--as opposed to toughing it out until new drivers were available--was checking Aureal's (the chipset vendor for the board) web site (looking for "reference drivers") and finding out Aureal has filed for bankruptcy. At that point I figured this was a losing proposition all around, as improved drivers were likely a LONG way away. The reference drivers do work under Win2k, however, although you won't get all the functions that Turtle Beach provides in the Montego II Home Studio (notably, no digital I/O and no Cancun daughter board).
I never could get ANY digital functions running, under any driver version I tried.
So... with all that up front, would I recommend this board? Yes. As long as in purchasing it you understand that it's for Win95/98/NT4 systems only, at this point. Based on the performance of the other Turtle Beach boards I've owned (and that friends own) I feel safe in saying that on those systems you'll get a great board, with ALL the features enabled.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199.95
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Epinions.com ID:
aerobrick
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Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 0 members
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