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Voyetra-Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
By Kelly Lu - March 21, 2001
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Throughout the past few years, the computer industry has seen an unbelievable amount of growth, both economically and, more importantly for the consumer, technologically. Take the CPU, the most important component in a computer system, for example: within only half a decade, we saw this component accept a speed increase of about fifteen-fold-from 100MHz to 1.5GHz. Or how about the graphics card? We've come from virtually no support for 3D acceleration just a few years ago to having cards that are capable of processing millions of polygons per second. Even the little things that help to keep your system chugging along such as cooling technologies have improved over the years. Makers such as Thermaltek and the like have opened a new market for themselves, tailoring their products to the "l33t overclocking" community with each new product allowing overclockers to take their hardware to new levels.
I must pause, now, from all this reminiscence to observe one similar aspect found in all of these scenarios: healthy competition. Intel has AMD and Cyrix, NVIDIA had 3dfx and still has ATI, Thermaltek has every overclocker out there and, well, you get the point. So our conclusion to this little pause? Competition is good! It may not be good for the huge corporations who are behind the advancement of technology since they have to invest more money on R&D in order to get less return because of price cuts, all of this is all beneficial for us, the consumer.
One market in the computer industry that I've found to be lacking in advancement recently is the sound card market. It once seemed that it was going to be heaven for us audio-lovers with Creative having to put up with the competition that Aureal brought to the mix, but all that has changed. With the surprising demise of Aureal last year, there has been virtually no competition under the radar for the multimedia giant, Creative, and it sure seems like the consumer is starting to see the effects of it.
Over the few years that Creative and Aureal were fighting for the title of having the most popular 3D API, we saw them craw over each other with the rapid release of updates to their own proprietary API's: A3D and EAX. Now, however, with Aureal out of the picture, what has Creative brought us recently? … Um… not much, if you're talking about their sound card technologies. They haven't made any changes to their EAX 3D API and all we've seen is them following up on their original SoundBlaster Live! Series with some variations such as the MP3+ and Platinum, which included, unfortunately, the exact same card as any other Live! Series card, but only with a few extra perks.
 So, with competition action between the popular corporations virtually eliminated and the remaining company not producing anything worthwhile in the post-battle period, we turn our attention to some of the lesser-known makers of audio products. Voyetra-Turtle Beach is whom we're focusing on today and their high-end Santa Cruz sound card is the product we're reviewing. Don't be fooled by my "lesser-known" talk, however, as Voyetra-Turtle Beach is no rookie in the audio business. The actual company as we know them today was formed in 1996 as a result of a merger, but the companies involved in the merger were both elites in the digital audio market with decades of experience. Voyetra was the maker of some of the most popular audio software products out there, and Turtle Beach was an industry leader in the music and recording business. Together now, Voyetra-Turtle Beach naturally claims to be unique in its "ability to develop full-featured turnkey products that inherently require a strong bond between the hardware and software components."
Although they're not as much of a household name in the minds of computer enthusiasts, they produce a wide-range of quality sound cards for everyone from the basic consumer to the demanding gamer. As a result of their quality, you might have seen their products in personal computers from some well-known brands, but none more prominent than Dell. As far as I can remember, Dell has been using Turtle Beach sound cards in their systems for some time now, so it will be interesting to see why that is so as we take a look at the Voyetra-Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card.
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