Turtle Beach Sound Cards

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Inspired

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I've recently started hearing a lot about Turtle Beach Sound Cards. Are these the holy grail of sound cards for recording, or are they more than you really need?
 
Inspired said:
I've recently started hearing a lot about Turtle Beach Sound Cards. Are these the holy grail of sound cards for recording
Absolutely Not
 
Just a little bit tastier than a SoundsGhastly soundcard.

Certainly no "Holy Grail" as far as soundcards go.

>or are they more than you really need?

Absolutely not!
 
I bought a Turtle Beach about ten years ago. It was then much better then the Sound Blaster ones.
It depends on where you want to use it for. If you gonna use it for games and mp3s and exploring midi and HD recording then you'd do fine with this card, But for serious HD recording you need a little bit more than that.

Henry
 
AFAIK, Turtle Beach cards are like the Soundblaster cards in that they are aimed primarily at the home user/gamer market. The outputs and onboard sounds are great. The inputs, however, are less than great.

Chris
 
Sound Cards

So is Sound Blaster the way to go for us home studio recorders? They look like a good choice. It shows they have internal and external cards. Internal means it just plugs into a sound card slot, right?
 
Re: Sound Cards

Inspired said:
So is Sound Blaster the way to go for us home studio recorders? They look like a good choice. It shows they have internal and external cards. Internal means it just plugs into a sound card slot, right?
Once again, the soundbalsters are not really ideal for recording although they will work. But if your going to fork out $150.00 for an audigy SB, you would be better off getting an Audiophile 2496 or the like.
 
It also depends on what your needs are. If you want a built-in MIDI synth on the card, you might choose the Turtle Beach or SoundBlaster cards. If you are a PC gamer you might do this too, as they support environmental audio and have a game port for a controller.

In modern fast PCs, an on-board MIDI synth is less important, as soft synths can fill in very well if you have a fast CPU and lots of RAM. Of course if you have external synths and/or samplers, an on-board synth chip might have very little appeal.

If you just want to record audio, and you don't want or need the on-board synth chip and the gaming integration, consider something like an M-Audio Audiophile or Echo Mia.

If yopu want to be able to record more than two tracks of audio simultaneously, you will want a multiport interface like the M-Audio Delta series, Echo Layla or any of a dozen or more other choices. More $$, of course...

Finally, just want to point out something in your terminology. You said, "Internal means it just plugs into a sound card slot, right?" "Sound card slot" is a misnomer. Sound cards plug into standard peripheral slots in the computer. Pretty much all modern ones are PCI cards, and connect to a PCI slot. Older cards used to plug into a different slot called an ISA slot, but these are pretty much obsolete and few motherboards (if any) are made with these slots any more. External cards like the Extigy that you mentioned typically plug into the computer via the USB port. These work OK for stereo I/O but USB has limited bandwidth, so they do not support multiple simultaneous audio I/O. This will be different in the near future as USB 2.0 supplants the original USB spec, and as FireWire (another type of high-speed interface port) becomes more common, but with the currently-available devices it's an issue to be aware of.
 
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