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Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
by Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau Chief

The advent of single chip DSP solutions created the potential for this step, and Turtle Beach took advantage of it, to create real high quality audio on a home computer. Looking at the specifications we might wonder if this is some type of home audio processor. Cirrus Logic supplies the DSP (Digital Audio Processor) engine, a Crystal® 4630 DSP processor. It has three stereo 18-bit ADC (analog to digital) converters and three stereo 20-bit DAC (digital to analog) converters. This is a PCI (2.1) BUS master card with 126-channel DMA interface. It is Plug and Play compatible with Windows 9X/W2K/NT 4.0 . There are no Windows Me drivers listed although it worked fine on my dual boot system.

My Lexicon DC-1 digital preamp/processor uses 20-bit DACs. It was $4500 two years ago and is still considered state of the art. The sampling rates are up to 48 kHz with sampling frequency accuracy of 0.01%. The newest DACs in the audiophile world today have 96 kHz sampling rates with many times oversampling (no oversampling specs were provided for this card.) Signal to Noise ratio is greater than 96 dB (A weighted) with a Total Harmonic Distortion less than 0.003% (A weighted). There is no frequency limit given for the S/N or THD performance as it is commonly quoted in home audio. Stereo crosstalk is also quite impressive at -66dB@10KHz; -85dB@1kHz; -150@100Hz. The frequency response is 10Hz - 20kHz but the variation of /-3dB is unexpectedly large. Often the frequency response of a digital processor falls off at the extreme ends of the range. The response of a very expensive (>US$10,000) audiophile full range speaker system is rarely better than 20Hz-20kHz /-3dB. Home PC speakers rarely have responses even close to this range.

Fig.1 Powerful control panel

The Santa Cruz Control panel is a large step forward from the setup that came with the original Turtle Beach Montego that I pulled out for this test. A hardware-based 10 band graphic equalizer is included.

Fig.2 Ten band graphic equalizer

 

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