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Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
By Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau ChiefPERFORMANCE
It was time for my sound quality test. I wanted to eliminate the PC speaker from the system to be able to evaluate the quality of the digital decoding on this card. The flexible configuration combined with about a mile of audio cables made this test possible.
So without further ado…
In the ring tonight, in the turquoise trunks, we have the challenger, the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz DSP PC audio card. And in the other corner the champion, in the black trunks, an Audio Alchemy Digital Decoding Engine with matching DTI anti-jitter device.
I was able to A/B these two very different devices on my audiophile setup by running the CDs digital output (the Audio Alchemy Digital Drive transport has two digital outputs) to both the AA DDE and the VersaJack on the Santa Cruz. The VersaJack on the Santa Cruz Control panel was set to digital input and the output set to two speaker. After quite a bit of cable fabrication (1/8” mini-jacks are not part of the standard quiver for most home audio enthusiasts) I had the speaker 1 / 2 outputs connected to the inputs of one of the tape loops of my tube preamp. I moved the output from the AA DDE from the CD inputs to the other tape input to make sure both decoders had an equal load. My preamp allows independent switching of recording (output) and input. I could toggle between using my high end AA digital transport and the Hitachi CDRW in my PC for a source and I could toggle between the AA decoder and the Santa Cruz.
Shock! Disbelief! My life as an audiophile flashed before my eyes. Although the differences in the two sources (PC CDRW and fancy digital transport) were clearly apparent (better soundstage, much cleaner and more open upper frequencies with the $1000 transport), the differences in the two decoding engines were much less obvious. The Santa Cruz was certainly a bit grainier and less full on the low end but the differences were subtler that my years in the audiophile rank and file would have led me to believe.
I considered disassembling my home theater setup to make a similar comparison between the Santa Cruz’s 4.1 Digital mode and a similar setup on the Lexicon DC-1 (Dolby Digital 5.1 with a phantom center channel would be similar). My wife threatened me with bodily harm if I did anything that changed the way the home theater operated.
I ran ZD’s Audio Winbench 99 and compared my two year old Turtle Beach Montego to the Santa Cruz. I was slightly surprised to find that overall the differences were bigger than I expected. The high CPU utilization for the Montego was a whopping 13.1% for DirectSound, 44.1 kHz, 16bit, 32 voices vs. 2.41 for the Santa Cruz. The highest CPU utilization for the Santa Cruz was 2.9% on a similar test for 16 voices (the Montego used 10.4% on the same test).
My report concludes with my highest recommendation to date for any audio card I have tested. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz gets my COMBATSIM.COM Top Pick award.
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Audio
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