Turtle Beach Montego DDL Sound Card

Features & Benefits
• Supports Dolby Digital Live multi-channel digital audio playback
• Enjoy surround sound PC audio on your digital speakers or home theater system
• Full-Duplex Digital Support
• Record & Playback simultaneously
• Runs Digital & Analog Audio concurrently
• No need to run 2 Sound Cards
• Optical S/PDIF input with up to 16 bit/48kHz resolution
• Connect to the latest high-tech home entertainment equipment with a pure-digital, distortion-free signal, for low noise, high fidelity audio reproduction.
• Optical S/PDIF output with 24 bit resolution at 48KHz or 96KHz
• Play DVDs on your PC with multi-channel digital speakers or home-theater systems.
• SPDIF output allows for pass-through of Dolby Digital and DTS multi-channel DVD sound to external A/V receivers with up to 7.1 Channel Surround Sound
• Enjoy multi-channel music, games and DVDs on 2, 4, 6 (5.1) or 8 (7.1) speaker systems.
• Selectable 2, 4, 6 or 8 analog line output channels
• Connect internal CD or DVD drives with analog outputs.
• Direct headphone drive capability on front channels.
• Enjoy realistic 3D sound effects in multi-channel games.
• External line input.
• Record from line level sources, such as CD players, cassette decks, music equipment, etc.
• External mic input.
• Record from external microphone or use microphone for video conferencing, game interaction, Internet phone, etc.
• Internal CD and Aux inputs.
• Listen to stereo digital music or movies with an enhanced multi-speaker surround sound environment using speakers or headphones
• Converts stereo sound sources to multi-channel format on the fly.

Environmental Effects
• Add a wide variety of reverberation effects to create simulated concert halls and spectacular home-theater surround-sound on multi-speaker systems or headphones.
• Supports Game Surround Sound APIs such as EAX 1 and 2, A3D, I3DL2 and DirectSound 3D support
• Included software suite
• Record CD’s, record your own music, edit digital audio, and more!

Versus the onboard VIA Envy24 sound featuring:

Audio Subsystem
• On-board 7.1-Channel audio
• 24-bit resolution audio format support
• Sampling rates up to 96KHz
• Multi-channel AC-link supported alternatively
• Supports S/PDIF Out

The above feature listing on the VIA Envy24 are from the page my motherboard manufacturer has for my particular board. Not one to be content with minimalistic facts I went to the source for the audios chipset, VIA.

Here’s a few more detailed features:

Sound Quality
• 24-bit resolution audio format support
• Sampling rates up to 96kHz

Input/Output
• 8×2 I/O on AC-link or I²S, up to 4×2 converters
• Simultaneous I²S for S/PDIF I/O up to 96kHz
• 20 channels, 36-bit wide digital mixer
• Peak meters on all 20 professional multi-track streams
• Concurrent 16 streams DirectSound TM accelerator
• Monitor and master copy functions
• Two MPU-401 MIDI UART ports
• DirectInput TM compatible Joystick port

Architecture
• PCI 2.1 with bus mastering and burst modes

Easy System Integration
• 8-bit GPIO port
• ACPI and PCI PMI support
• I²C subset I/F for E²PROM (configuration and ID storage) and peripherals control
• 24.576, 16.9344 or 22.5792 MHz crystal operation
• Windows 95/98, NT4.0 drivers

Other Features
• Sample Rate Converter for DirectSound applications
• HW SoundBlaster Pro legacy
• FM synthesis for DOS legacy
• 64-voices SW Wavetable General MIDI Synthesizer for Windows95

Package
• 128-pin PQFP (14mm x 20mm body)

Power
• 3.3V operating supply (5V tolerant I/O)

Not quite as feature rich as the DDL but still, it is pretty decent.