Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla by Tim "Flyboy" Henderson
	In May of 1998 we reviewed the Turtle Beach Montego and awarded it our TOP PICK for quality and overall performance. Not long afterward Aureal announced their Vortex II chipset, and we anticipated a great step forward in the evolution of PC sound hardware. We weren't disappointed. The Vortex II chipset is a great milestone in gaming hardware, and while the price of a top end sound board has dropped, the power has increased greatly. The number of hardware voices has tripled, and the number of simultaneous DirectSound and DirectSound3d streams has likewise increased. Diamond was the first to market with their MX300, and Turtle Beach followed not long afterward with their Montego II. But some reviewers were disappointed. While Diamond's board sported twin outputs, allowing direct connection for up to four speakers, the Montego II only had a single output. It turns out that Turtle Beach had something better in mind. Test System: Abit BX6 PII 400 128 MB PCI 100 Guillemot MaxiGamer Xentor 32 Quantum Fireball Plus MAG DX 17 Toshiba 40x CD TM F22 and TQS Cambridge FPS 2000 Digital Technical Specs Audio Converters: 18-bit ADC and DAC with 97dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Signal-to-Noise Ratio: 97dB (A-weighted). THD: Better than 90 dB (0.0032%) (A-weighted). Stereo Crosstalk: 1 KHz (-83 dB) 100 Hz (-97 dB) Frequency Response: 10 Hz - 20.5 KHz (+/-1 dB). Sampling Rates: up to 48 KHz. Digital Audio Processor: Hardware full-duplex Auto-muting after periods of digital silence. 16 hardware digital mixers for processing PCI audio streams. Sample Rate Converters: hardware-based sample rate converters A3D 2.0 Interactive Sound: Hardware based A3D positional audio Wavetracing® engine with wall reflections and occlusions (64 sources). Audio Inputs/Outputs: Microphone input, stereo line input, 2 stereo line output, stereo digital audio S/PDIF output, stereo aux input on internal header, CD input on internal header, modem audio in/out on internal header. Wavetable Synthesizer: 320-voice advanced wavetable synthesis (64 hardware + 256 accelerated software). Reverberation and chorus on MIDI wavetable instruments. DLS compatible for user configurable instruments. Click to continue		MIDI Interface: Hardware-based MPU-401 MIDI UART-compatible interface through joystick connector. Joystick Interface: As well as providing standard analog/digital joystick support, the digital joystick performs remote polling of the joystick position without CPU intervention. Speaker/S/PDIF Outputs: Requires an available space but not a slot. Installation Two slots are required by the Quadzilla since it is bundled with the daughtercard. Why did Turtle Beach go this route? There were three key reasons: Real estate. TB heard from a number of users that the back of cards were already too jammed with jacks and that adding two others, especially when using bulky high-end cables (such as a metal-jacketed RCA plug), would only cause frustration. It allows them to use the same base card that they developed for Dell systems, reducing the need to develop an entirely different retail card (and thus keeping the board cost down for the end-user in the process). AudioStation32 It allowed for modularity. If a Quadzilla owner wants to move up to the higher-end bracket board that they are releasing (RCA and optical I/Os), they can do so easily. At the same time, this design allows the hundreds of thousands of people who have bought or will buy the OEM board in a Dell system to add the S/PDIF and rear speaker capability. Zimple isn't it? I inserted the CD on boot up and the board was detected by WIN98. Driver installation went smoothly. The typical midi and wav file utilities are included, as well as Hip Hop eJay and X-Wing Alliance. I had some fun playing with the EQ in AudioStation32. Watch out for Orchestrator Plus, it's a time gobbler! Go to Page Two
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