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Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
By Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau ChiefCONFIGURATION
This was my first four channel audio card. I had heard positional audio via headphones using Aureal’s A3D v2.0 HRTF based drivers. Also known as holographic audio or holophonics, this works fairly well with headphones that remove many of the variables having to do with speaker position, head and ear shape, and room configurations. The effect is to place sounds beyond the physical locations of the audio drivers (speakers or headphones). In simple terms, for example, your mind is tricked into believing that the source of a sound is located behind your back even though the two speakers producing the sound are in front of you.
My Lexicon home theater processor has one of the best interaural crosstalk cancellation codecs, based on HRTF, currently on the market. Even with very careful set up, the sweet spot for true two speaker positional audio is very small. Headphones clamp the sweet spot firmly around your head and can provide a very realistic sensation of surround sound from two point sources. However, nothing can replace multiple speakers if you want to accurately place sounds in three-dimensional space. The Santa Cruz audio card supports an assortment of the usual PC codices (A3D 1.0, EAX 1.0/2.0, DirectSound, DirectSound3D). Additionally supported is Dolby Digital pass through via the VersaJack.
Fig.6 Full set of inputs and outpus
The VersaJack is one of the most interesting features of the Santa Cruz. It is software configurable from the Control Panel as Analog In or Out, Digital Out, or headphone out. This is very convenient. I can switch from four channel, four speaker mode to headphones with a quick click on the Control Panel. This is really great for late night gaming. The VersaJack solves the problem of limited card input/output real estate without the need for a daughter card. As you can see from the graphic above, the card has a full complement of connections. In my setup I am using every jack on the card. My PC test system has a Labtec mic and headphones plugged into the mic and VersaJack inputs, Altec Lansing ACS48 (satellite/sub) plugged into the front speaker jack, a pair of Altec Lansing ACS90s plugged into the rear speaker jack, and the output of from the tape loop of my audio system plugged into the line in. I have a set of Thomas Enterprises rudder pedals using the game port. The card places channels five and six on VersaJack in six-channel mode. The VersaJack also can support S/PDIF out.
The inputs are equally flexible. Digital or analog external input (VersaJack again!), microphone, a MIDI interface plus the usual suspects internally to connect a modem, analog CD output, digital CD output (S/PDIF), a second internal analog input from a DVD, second CD, or another high level source. The MIDI port doubles as a standard joystick port but does all polling on the card which is said to reduces the load on the CPU. I tried as many different input and output modes as I could and found that the card worked flawlessly with everything I threw at it. The Control Panel is one of the easiest interfaces to use I have encountered to date. It always did just what I expected it to do. The Control Panel displays labels for the input/output jacks that change with each change in mode selection. These labels make hook-ups a breeze and errant connections a thing of the past.
