Below are some very detailed specs on the Santa Cruz pulled right off of Voyetra Turtle Beach's website:

Advanced 3D Positional Audio Support: Sensaura HRTF 3D audio technology places sources in the X, Y and Z planes for true 360° positional effects that appear above, below and all around you. DSP accelerates 32 hardware and 16 software DirectSound3D™ streams. Compatible with A3D™ 1.0, EAX™ 1.0/2.0, IA3D, MacroFX™, MultiDrive™, Virtual Ear™. 2, 4 or 6-Speaker Digital Surround Sound: Home-theater surround sound through headphones or multiple speakers. Immersive 3D gaming and DVD audio with 2, 4 or 6-speakers and headphones (playback of Dolby Digital movie soundtracks from DVD requires a compatible software DVD player/encoder with provision for 6 speaker output). Digital Audio Connectivity: Digital Outputs connect to external Dolby Digital® decoders, digital speakers and other home audio equipment with digital input. Effects Processing: 10-band graphic EQ with presets and peak meters. Digital effects with versatile dual-bus effects routing mixer. Acoustic Sound Fields: Customizable "sound fields" enhance playback of MP3, CD, DVD and other audio formats. Unlike sound cards that provide monophonic effects, Santa Cruz can position effects for each sound source to any speaker to create the perfect listening environment. MIDI Wavetable Synthesizer: 8MB DLS synthesizer with scalable DSP/Host load sharing. 64-voice hardware polyphony with up to 1024 software voices. MIDI controllers for reverb, chorus, volume, envelope, pitch shift, tremolo and vibrato. Audio Converters: Dual AC-97 2.1 audio codecs with full-duplex capability, for simultaneous recording and playback at sampling rates up to 48kHz. Three stereo 18 bit A/D converters for high-resolution recording (provides 4x better resolution than 16 bit converters). Three stereo 20 bit D/A converters for high-resolution playback of up to 6 independent streams.

Analog (A-A): Frequency Response: 10Hz - 120kHz (-3dB) SNR: 96dB FS A-weighted. THD+N: (-3dB): < -91dB FS (0.0027%). Crosstalk: -105dB @ 100Hz Digital Playback (D-A): Frequency Response: 10Hz - 120kHz (-3dB) SNR: 90dB FS A-weighted. THD+N: (-3dB FS): < -87dB FS (0.004%). Digital Recording (A-D): Frequency Response: (-3dB) @ Fs = 48kHz: 10Hz to 20kHz SNR: 93dB FS A-weighted. THD+N: (-3dB FS): < -84dB FS (0.005%). Digital Output: 48kHz PCM audio or Dolby Digital® AC-3 for external decoder. Games Compatibility: Supports most DOS games in Windows 95/98 (DOS box and Real Mode) Analog Quad Mixer: Lets you pan analog sources between four speakers.

Whew! That was a breath-full! If you don't understand all the technical mumble jumble above, don't worry. Basically, it states that the Santa Cruz is a really powerful sound card that's loaded with features! It has support for 2-speakers, 4-speakers, 6-speakers, 5.1 digital output and, of course, headphones. Also, it is loaded with connectors--check this out:

Well, you can be sure that you'll have enough inputs and outputs to plug just about any audio device you want into this thing. It's got the usual front and rear jacks that you would expect out of any high-end sound card, mic and line-in's and, something that's unique in the Santa Cruz, a jack that Turtle Beach calls "VersaJack." Basically, it's an extra jack that can be programmed to be either a 5.1 digital output jack (for plugging into a Dolby Digital decoder), an extra headphone jack or, this is very cool, another 2 speakers for an added 5th and 6th channel in an analog surround sound set up. Very cool and much better than the yellow jack on the SoundBlaster Live! that only supports digital out.

As you might expect, the Santa Cruz is right at the top of Voyetra-Turtle Beach's pyramid of sound cards. Other noteworthy features are its ability to do hardware-based MP3 decoding, which might help if you have a slow computer (< 300MHz), support for both Creative's EAX (both 1.0 and the newest 2.0) and Aureal's A3D (unfortunately, only version 1.0, most-likely using software emulation, much like how Creative does it with their Live! Cards) 3D API's and support for 2, 4 and 6-channel audio. As you can see, the Santa Cruz is already a feature-packed sound card that can compete with Creative's popular SoundBlaster Live! Series pound-for-pound. Unlike the Live!, however, the Santa Cruz is made up of circuitry and technology developed by a collective group of companies that delivers such features.

At the center of the Santa Cruz is the Cirrus Logic Crystal 4630 SoundFusion DSP processor that enables it to have such a wide range of powerful features. Not nearly as powerful as Creative's EMU10K1 audio processor that's at the center of the SoundBlaster Live! Series of sound cards, the CL4630 is still capable of offloading most of the sound processing from the main CPU. It is also capable of re-configuring itself in real-time, allowing it to allocate and reallocate its resources based on what task needs to be done. This allows it to, for example, devote most of its resources on MP3 decoding, and then switch over to 3D audio acceleration, all based on what the user is doing at that time.

The unique part of the Santa Cruz, however, is not in the audio processor, but in the technology that the audio processor uses to provide it with all the features that it is capable of delivering. This technology is called Sensaura 3D.

On to: Sensaura Technology Introduced