Installation of the hardware was a breeze. All that was involved was for me to pull out my old sound card then plug in the Santa Cruz in the same slot. Powering up the computer, Windows detected the card fine...

But it didn't install the right drivers so that it would work right out of the box. So, I decided to stick in the included CD with the drivers on it, but it gave me a message stating that the software will only install under Windows 95/98 (I was running Windows 2000) and quickly terminated itself. That's weird, I thought. Windows 2000 has already been released for about a year now, and they still don't have Windows 2000 drivers on their driver CD?

Feeling a little frustrated, I tried visiting the Voyetra-Turtle Beach website for updated drivers. After a few minutes of flipping through their site, I found the driver page for the Santa Cruz. They did have Windows 2000 drivers for download (Windows ME drivers were also there as well), but, get this; the newest version is still a beta version! I don't know about you, but I shudder at the thought of installing beta software on my computer. Luckily, though, we should expect some non-beta drivers available for the two OS's as time progresses, but I find it disappointing to see a company take this long to support an OS that has been out for almost about a year now.

Regardless of which, since the beta version was the only one available, I downloaded, extracted and installed it. Luckily, the installation went through quite smoothly. The Santa Cruz was finally installed and ready to go.

After rebooting my computer, I was greeted with a nice green replacement icon for the Windows volume control (I later found out that this only appears with Windows 2000, and doesn't with Windows 95/98/ME-it can be opened from the Control Panel with these OS's). Double clicking on the icon brought up the Santa Cruz control in a very nice-looking interface. Everything, from speaker configuration to reverb effects to volume control can all be configured from this interface. I really liked the Santa Cruz control panel because it allows one to configure every aspect of their sound system right from one centralized interface.

Setting the speaker configuration to 4 speakers, I was all set to test out how this card sounds!

On to: Sound Quality