• "3D audio is compatible with A3D™ 1.0, EAX™1.0/2.0, IA3D, MacroFX™, MultiDrive™, Virtual Ear™" - This is a good list of 3D audio API's, with support for EAX 1 and 2 being the most interesting as these are the most supported API's.
• "48 kHz PCM audio or Dolby Digital^® AC-3 for external decoder." - This should allow for no loss in signal quality when playing DVD's using the digital out.
• "The DSP accelerates 32 hardware and 16 software DirectSound3D streams" - Having this many audio streams is useful, if for instance you wish to play a couple of MP3's in Winamp, watch a video clip, and listen to a CD, then all these will be done without accessing the CPU that much.

The Card - Continued

    What though does the card look like and what comes with it?  Lets see:

• The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound card
• Users manual
• Driver/application CD
• CD Audio connector
• EJay SE mixing software

Installation/Drivers

    The installation of the card into the PCI slot went very easily, with the card being slightly out of alignment with the slot but that was easily remedied.

    For drivers, when I first installed them it took a total of two reboots before the card and the software were installed.  It was one reboot for the Santa Cruz drivers and then one reboot for the applications.  To compare to the Live and Audigy it only took one reboot, as the software and drivers are combined. 

    But how much space does the drivers/software take up?  The software installed was Playcenter/AudioStation, WaveStudio/AudioView, Surround Mixer/Santa Cruz sound panel and of course the drivers.  For the Audigy the install was 153MB, while the Live 5.1 was 105MB.  The Santa Cruz install was a 'paltry', at least when compared to the Audigy and the Live 5.1, 75MB.  Having a slimmer install is more efficient and wastes less of your precious hard drive space and doesn't feel as 'bloated'.  The updated drivers for the Santa Cruz are available for download, unlike Creative's products, and weigh in at a good 20MB download.

    After the drivers/applications are installed the Creative cards so what that extra 30-75MB install did.  The Creative cards now have both an auto loaded disc detector and/or an EAX video at start up, which really irritates me.  The Santa Cruz's mixer is actually integrated into the standard sound controllers on the taskbar, unlike Creative products which uses a separate program for a mixer.  The styling of the mixer was very nicely laid out and looked very professional.

The Versa Jack/Outputs

    Now lets look at the interesting feature only on the Santa Cruz, the Versa Jack.  As we saw in the control panel the Versa Jack can be configured on the fly for one of three duties, digital out, analog out, or a secondary line in.  The addition of the secondary line in is the only difference between the rear ports of this card and the other cards it was tested against.  The extra line in is called the 'auxiliary-in' in the control panel.  You can also record both the line-in and the auxiliary-in using the stereo mix selection in the recording tab. 

    The digital out function of the Versa Jack is just like that on any of the Creative cards with digital out, it just sends the signal to an external amp to be processed there.  The digital out allows both Dolby Digital and DTS pass through and also allows for standard audio to use this path, such as wave, MP3's, Midi files, etc. to be processed.  But the digital out does not allow for the signal from the line-in to be sent to an external receiver/amp, in fact I asked this of one of Turtle Beach/Voyetra's technical support people and the exact response is as follows:

        "We apologize but the Line In will not pass out the digital out on-the-fly. It will need to be recorded first and then played back to get it out the digital output. Regards, Tom"

    This isn't good as one of my main uses of my computer is as a TV, and I only use the digital out of my sound card to connect to my Dolby Digital receiver, so therefore I am reduced to not being able to listen to TV programs unless I record them.   As a side note both Creative cards do allow for sound from the line-in to be sent through the digital out.  The cable needed to connect the digital out an receiver/amp is a 1/8" to dual RCA audio cable (seen below), and to get the digital signal you need to connect the red connector to the digital connector on the receiver/amp.  With the cable attached like that you can play both digital and analog sounds (as mentioned previously).

    The analog out function of the Versa Jack works as stated, basically sending out the sub/center channel information to a compatible set of speakers/receiver.

Test Systems

    As a sound card we need to test both the sound quality and the performance of this card, so before we look at the results let us first see the system setup for the tests.

Computer

    For the other audio tests the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 was the standard used for comparison, thus it was given a 5 in both MP3 and CD Audio tests.  The MP3's used were of a wide variety, from hard rock to classical music to allow for a full range of sound to be heard.  The CD audio tracks used were classical music that tested the range and quality of the sound cards.

    Game performance was tested using Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast with the latest patch, which supports EAX HD (or 3.0).  The following video settings were used: 640X480, 16 bit color, 16 bit textures, Dynamic Lights = off, Anisotropic filtering = off, Detailed Shadows = off, Wall Marks = off, Graphics Detail = medium, Texture detail = medium, Bilinear filtering.  The demo was run a minimum of three times with the closest three scores being averaged together.  Sound performance was tested using EAX (HD), No EAX, and low settings with no sound.

Audio Quality Tests - Subjective

    We've looked at the card and the drivers now let us look at what kind of quality we are looking at sound-wise.  The listener did not know which sound card was in at which time and as such was able to give an honest subjective opinion of the sound of the systems.  The person used has had previous experience in detecting the quality of sound and as such I believe that he is an ideal tester for sound quality analysis.  I would like to thank him for his cooperation in this test.

    You can see the audio system setup in the previous page so how did the Santa Cruz sound in DVD movies when compared to the Zenith DVD player and the two Creative cards?  Let us see:

DVD Movies

    Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

• Rating  - 6/10
• Comments - The sound was 'brighter' than the reference player.  The vocals were more defined and separate from the musical tracks in the movies.

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1

• Rating - 6/10
• Comments - The sound was quieter than the reference player.  I also noticed some jittering in the playback that was not there on the previous card (Santa Cruz).

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy

• Rating - 5/10
• Comments - Sound was not as 'detailed' as the reference player.  There was some jitter present in playback on this card as well.

MP3's

    Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

• Rating  - 3/10
• Comments - The guitar parts tested sounded very good; the bass was excellent;

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1

• Rating -5/10
• Comments - There were no glaring flaws in the sound quality.  Overall a well balanced sound.

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy

• Rating - 2/10
• Comments - The sound was harsh but at the same time it was also very bright.  The guitar sounds were acoustically very well defined.

CD Audio

    Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

• Rating  - 4/10
• Comments - The sound was well defined but it was still a little too 'bright'.

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1

• Rating -5/10
• Comments - The sound was well defined and balanced, while being fairly natural.

    Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy

• Rating - 3/10
• Comments - This card was quieter than the reference card.  The instruments were not as detailed as the reference card.

Audio Performance

    Now let us look at the performance of this card compared to the other two.  There should not be a major difference between these cards, except that the Audigy can use EAX HD while the others cannot, this could boost or lower performance compared to the other cards.  Lets see how the Santa Cruz does in this test:

    Well with no EAX we see the cards perform the same, with a very slight loss in performance compared to not having any audio.  With EAX enabled the results get a little strange, if we pick the Audigy as being at what it should when using EAX HD then either the Live 5.1 or the Santa Cruz is not performing as it should, as both cards only have EAX 1.0 and 2.0.  The Live looks like it is trying to emulate EAX 3 in software and as a result is performing badly.  The Santa Cruz seems to be ignoring EAX HD commands and just doing what it can in hardware.  Either way the Santa Cruz performs just as well as the 'standard' Creative cards.

    Many people have criticized Creative sound cards, and especially the Live series of cards, as being PCI bus hogs.  The Audio quality tests seem to show this as both the Live and Audigy showed noticeable stutter in playing DVD movies.  Another area that uses the PCI bus is video capturing.  Capturing uncompressed YUV2 video at 720X480 (DVD Resolution) with Stereo Audio can easily take 20+ MBps for capture and can definitely put a strain on the PCI bus.  So we tested capturing 30 minutes of uncompressed video to our 40GB Maxtor 7200RPM (D740X) hard drive connected to the Highpoint 372 controller on the motherboard to see how many drops each sound card created.  Lets see the results:

Conclusions

    After having looked at the Santa Cruz card itself, the drivers behind the card, the audio quality, and the performance of this card, what can we conclude about this sound card?  Lets look at the results section by section.

    The card itself is fairly standard looking, the only distinguishing features are the 2cm*1.4cm Crystal chip, and the wavetable header on the card.   The Versa Jack on the back of the card is the only difference one can see from the back of this card.  The major hardware based problem with this board is that you cannot hear the line-in sound while you are in digital mode, which is a major disappointment for me.

    The drivers on the other hand are very feature filled without getting that bloated feeling the Creative drivers seems to give.  The ability to change the Versa Jack from digital out to analog-in with a click of the mouse is a very handy feature.  I didn't touch on the special effects of this card for one reason, I've found I only use them once and then turn the effects off as to me they are nothing more than a marketing gimmick.  Driver/application updates are free to download, unlike some other companies.

    The sound quality of this card is better than the Audigy (in the opinion of my tester), but was not as good as the Sound Blaster Live 5.1.  The major complaint about this card is that it is noticeably 'brighter' sounding than most other cards, which can detract from the experience of the sound.

    Performance is very good, equaling or bettering both Creative cards in Jedi Knight, which uses EAX for sound.  The card didn't seem to saturate the PCI bus either in the DVD tests or when capturing high-resolution video.

    So the question remains, is this card a legitimate competitor to Creative's products?  I would say that yes it is a good competitor for the Sound Blaster Live 5.1, but doesn't have as many features to compete with the Audigy, though it seems to have better sound than this new card.  The price of this card is also an issue, as a OEM Live 5.1 can be about $32 (US) shipped, while the Santa Cruz costs about double that, which is about the same price as the Audigy.  If I were given a choice of the three I'd probably go with a good old Live 5.1 as its inexpensive but still sounds very good when compared to these more expensive cards, and I already have some Firewire ports on my computer.

    I would like to thank Silver Bullet PC for providing me with the Santa Cruz, they are one of the few places that actually had the Santa Cruz and would deliver it to Canada.   I would also like to thank Peter P. for his help in doing the subjective audio tests.

Good

• Drivers are very streamlined and simple to use
• Ability to have a second line-in
• Digital Out works well
• Good quality of sound
• Doesn't saturate the PCI bus

Bad

• Can't hear line-in in digital mode
• Expensive
• No ground breaking features