Turtle Beach Montego DDL Sound Card

[PAGETITLE=Introduction] Todays PC audio is getting more and more sophisticated. It used to be that all you had were a pair of desktop speakers and a 2 channel soundcard and you were happy. Back around 2000 that all started to change with the advent of quadraphonic soundcards and 4.1 speaker systems beginning to hit the scene. It wasn't too long after that that we began seeing 5.1 surround soundcards followed slowly by a good selection of 5.1 capable speaker systems, but, this is always the case. You won't see support for a new feature until the manufacturers are certain that the new feature will actually be embraced by consumers. Then we saw the first 6.1 soundcards followed pretty quickly by 7.1. With the second generation of 5.1 soundcards we also saw more manufacturers begin including optical S/PDIF outputs which allow you to hook your 5.1+ home theater system with optical digital inputs up to your soundcard for surround sound from Dolby Digital sources. Up until recently (except in the case of nForce 2 based motherboards with SoundStorm audio) this meant that you were only able to get Dolby Digital support from DVD audio since no other audio sources (games, music, ETC.) featured Dolby Digital audio support. Up until recently this lack of on the fly Dolby Digital encoding has been the norm amongst even the most high dollar soundcards. Enter the Montego DDL. The Montego DDL from Turtle Beach features real-time Dolby Digital encoding on the fly so that all your sound sources going to your 5.1/6.1/7.1 home theater systems with optical digital inputs will have surround. This means if you are using your PC as a HTPC/gaming rig you'll no longer need to have dedicated 5.1 computer speakers for surround support in games or do without surround if you were just using your home theater sound system exclusively for sound playback. Listed below are the specs for both the Montego DDL and the onboard audio that I'll be comparing it to in the listening and user interface areas. Specifications for Montego DDL Optical S/PDIF In/Out for playback of pure digital audio at resolutions of up to 24 Bits at 96kHz (out) sample rate playback and 16 Bits at 48kHz sample rate for recording (in). Allows for pass-through of Dolby Digital and DTS multi-channel DVD sound to external A/V receivers or digital speaker systems. Selectable 2, 4, 6 or 8 output channels with 24 bit playback at up to 96 kHz sampling rate. Converts stereo sound sources to multi-channel format, so you can listen to 2-channel MP3 digital music or movies with enhanced multi-speaker surround sound environment. Pure surround sound and virtual surround sound from eight analog outputs provides 7.1 surround sound for DVDs, CDs, and MP3s. Supports Game Surround Sound APIs such as EAX 2.0 and A3D. PCI 2.2 Interface with bus mastering and burst modes. DTS Passthrough only available in Windows 2000 / XP. Channels 7 and 8 only available in Windows XP. Inputs/Outputs Mic Input. Stereo Line Input. Front channels L/R out (1 & 2) Surround channels L/R out (3 & 4) Center/Sub woofer channels out (5 & 6) Rear channels L/R out (7 & 8) S/PDIF Out (Optical) S/PDIF In (Optical) Internal input connectors for CD and Aux audio sources. [PAGEBREAK] [PAGETITLE=Features and Specs] 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: Key Features Sound Quality 24-bit resolution audio format support. Sampling rates up to 96kHz. Input/Output 8x2 I/O on AC-link or IÂ²S, up to 4x2 converters. Simultaneous IÂ²S 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. IÂ²C subset I/F for EÂ²PROM (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. [PAGEBREAK] [PAGETITLE=Montego Software] On a side note I'd like to point out that while the DDL supports 96khz sampling rates for analog playback it only has 16bit DACs which means you're actually not getting full 24bit resolution on analog playback. Whether this will be an issue will come out in listening. First up we'll take a look at user interfaces. On the Envy24 side of things we start out with the control panel which has the different tabs for Playback, Record, Source, Digital in, Speaker Configuration, Advanced Controls, Information and Q Sound. It offers a pretty well rounded set of features for onboard really. As you can see, for an onboard soundcard the Envy24 offers pretty decent options for choosing things like S/PDIF rates, Stereo expander, analog sampling rates, center/LFE swap which is nice because it won't force you to use a jumper. Here's a quick overview of the Q Sound control panel, for a more detailed look at all the features of Q Sound you can go here and take a look. Since I'm not doing a review of my onboard audio I'm only interested in comparing certain things which are directly comparable between the two cards and those features are environmental modeling and comparative listening experiences. Onto the Montego DDL! When you put the install CD for the DDL in your drive after physically installing the card, you'll be met with the following options which are all pretty self explanatory. Here you'll find the included applications with your audio card, I didn't play with the demos due to time constraints but I did install the recording station. Recording station which is like a multitrack recorder which will allow you to combine multiple tracks of digital music and/or MIDI music. I also installed Audio Surgeon which is quite a complex piece of software, it allows you to open almost any digital soundform and edit, add echo, clean up audio artifacts such as hiss, pops and distortion. You can do this to the entire waveform or selected areas which makes it really nice for converting older audio formats to digital and allows you to clean up trouble spots in an otherwise fine file. [PAGEBREAK] [PAGETITLE=Software Cont. & Customer Service] The DDL control panel allows you to set the speaker configuration via a drop down menu and offers volume controls for all the speaker outputs along with the S/PDIF options in another drop down menu and visual indicators of what sound effects you have functioning. The effects tab offers a virtual speaker positioning effect for helping to clean up any discrepancies in your speaker placement versus ideal placement. In the position effect you'll also see the rotate buttons which set the virtual speakers spinning around your actual speaker array which is pretty interesting. The environments section has a drop down menu for choosing the simulated "room" that you're listening in and the size buttons below that set the amount of reverberation in depth, speed and decay unfortunately though there's no setting for mixing the input signal with the processed signal output and sadly the signal you get by default is very "wet" (a musician's term for saturated with effect) which makes it difficult to follow either lyrics in music or...

Turtle Beach Montego DDL Sound Card

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