near-audiophile sound
Written: Dec 23 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: superb sound, excellent XP drivers, versatile
Cons: hmmm...no external port drive?
The Bottom Line: terrific sound, great drivers, go with an OEM model
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| beanbear's Full Review: Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card |
Abstract:
The Santa Cruz is one of the best sound cards available, even though it is almost 3 years old. Ditch your SB Live! and plug in an OEM version for less than $50.
Features:
Crystal DAC, 2-4-6 speaker surround, 2 AC97 2.1 codecs, VersaJack, all standard ports incl. game port, CD-ROM connector, etc.
Performance:
The Crystal (Cirrus Logic) chip is probably the best in the business, even though CL is now defunct. SB's latest Audigy finally rivals it in performance, but it took them a long time to finally get a chip that is as good. Still, the Crystal DAC is cleaner with even less of the electrical noise than the Audigy - something you'll definitely notice if you have your home stereo hooked up to your computer.
The VersaJack, in conjunction with the other rear speaker ports, allows you have 4 channel sound PLUS a pair of headphone always plugged in. At any given moment, I can switch between 2- and 4-channel sound and my headphone amp. Very nice.
Unless you go with a pro-level (re: $300) audio midi card, you won't get better performance for music. The Santa Cruz is very forgiving of the lossy sound in mp3's and quite robust with full CD audio as well. 4-channel and 6-channel surround in games and DVD's is stunning.
Drivers:
Turtle Beach is far and away better than SB in getting stable drivers out and there were none of the issues ever with VIA's 686B southbridge. For those unfamiliar with the issue, SB's Live! drivers were wreaking havoc with AMD people since most had VIA chipset motherboards with 686B southbridges. Data corruption, random crashes, lost connections - it was ugly.
The Santa Cruz driver experience was a bit painful under Win2K, but Turtle Beach quickly released an XP unified driver within days of when XP went "golden master."
Value:
Pretty good at $80 retail, though I think to be near that $100 mark, a 5 1/4" bay is now becoming standard. Find an OEM model from ebay for $50 or so, and that's the best bet. It's also available (with a drive) as the $150 Hercules Game Theater XP...if that's your thang...
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 45.00
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Epinions.com ID:
beanbear
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Member: B Kim
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 7 members
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