New TurtleBeach 7.1 sound card

[Belwarrior]

http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/catalina/indetail.asp

No idea how good this card is.. but competition should be good for the market..

Didnt think TurtleBeach had survived though as there was no news of them for a while.. are they still the same company or have been bought over?

[UtwigMU]

We discussed this on Ars, this card uses VIA Envy chipset and should be interesting.

WRT to Turtle Beach, the upgrades cycles are slower in souncard business compared to videocard business. And the Creative is big name, so you hear little about others. Also the 5.1 and 6.1 channel coming into motherboards does not bode well for discrete card makers.



It should be interesting to see Hercules' next offerings that will likely be based on this chipset.

[bsdgeek]

Which Envy?

[dZeus]

HT-S. the 80 USD retail price they show on the website is quite high considering they use the HT-S envy vs. the HT on for example the Revo 7.1.

[TransformX]

Cheap: http://us.hercules.com/products/show...p?p=58&b=0&f=1
Cheaper: http://us.hercules.com/products/show...p?p=56&b=0&f=1

[UtwigMU]

I have the Digifire 7.1 in my rig and it uses CS4624 chip (same as Turtle Beach Santa Cruz), not VIA Envy.

It costs ~$95/~€80 Euros, which is not exactly cheap - considering that two people who were shoping for an AutoCAD box at the same time in the shop, had hard time spending as much on their videocard as I did on my soundcard.

Otherwise, the Digifire is great, and if you want decent soundcard for not too much money, Fortissimo III is a good choice.

[Kooldino]

Looks like it's a decent card, but my Santa Cruz has a "Versajack" that I really love.

[UtwigMU]

What's the deal with Versajack?

[lecter]

AFAIK it's basically a software-controlled jack that can be configured as anything - another microphone input, speaker output, etc.

[Spire]

I too was disappointed to see that the new card doesn't feature a VersaJack.

[bsdgeek]

The cheaper Riviera has one.

[VJ]

I personally don't like those versa-jack kind of things. My current mainboard has that: line in can also act as rear speakers out; mic in can also act as center+subwoofer. But I find it annoying that you have the disconnect cables to change you configuration. I'd rather have all single-function connectors, so that you can leave everything connected.

Jörg

[UtwigMU]

What I like is that you can flip between headphones and speakers via drivers.

[Spire]

Originally posted by UtwigMU
What I like is that you can flip between headphones and speakers via drivers.

That's precisely what I use my VersaJack for. I never have to fiddle with any cables at the back, because everything is done in software.

Unfortunately, not only does the new Catalina not have a VersaJack; it doesn't even have a dedicated headphone jack. Apparently, you have to reach in the back and unplug a pair of speakers to be able to use headphones.

[MultimediaMan]

I've got 5.1 Speakers, and with the Catalina it supports 7.1, the kicker here is that you can select Headphone Out on ANY of the outputs, thus in my particular case, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

I will likely be getting one of these for my Workstation rig, moving my ever-faithful Santa Cruz to do duty as part of my telephony PC. As it is now, my Workstation spends most of its time as the World's Least Efficient answering machine: Dual MP2600, 1GB RAM, etc...