Turtle Beach Montego PCI A3Dxtream soundcard

June 17, 1998

Last addendum May 29 , 1998

Turtle Beach is a world acclaimed soundcard and audio hardware manufacturers and when this company launch a new product it always looks like a great happening. If this company is so successful it is for many reasons and one of them is the quality of their products. It is not a secret that Turtle Beach became in the course of the time a reference among soundcard manufacturers. This new Montego 3Dxtream soundcard I am reviewing on this page is another great products of this company and I am inviting you to discover it with me in the following lines.

The installation of this soundcard is pretty similar to the MAgicWave soundcard as the Win95 CD is also required several times during installation so I had to switch back and forth between the Win95 CD and the Montego installation CD to complete the installation of this soundcard. This is not very surprising because both of these cards are using the Aureal 8820 Vortex audio Chipset. After I finished the drivers installation I also noticed as much booting speed reduction than when I installed the MagicWave soundcard, so, I must come to the conclusion that the additional load is coming from the drivers for this audio Chipset !

Once the drivers installation is completed you are automatically brought to the audio applications wizard so all you have to do is to choose which applications you would like to have and voila the wizard will install them for you !

Now, I'd like to say a word about the audio applications included on the installation CD of this soundcard. To be honest I just can't find a word to describe the richness and profusion of the audio applications included on the CD as they are so numerous and so original ! In the program group where a new group is installed you will find 8 different icons which are the : A3D demo, the AudioStation, the Digital Orchestrator pro demo, the Jam Grid, the Midi Orchestrator plus, the Music games, link button to the Turtle Beach Web site and the Montego Testing and Troubleshooting feature.

I will not describe all these applications because it would require too much space but instead of it I will give details about some of these applications I especially loved. The first thing that I have really been amazed by is the care showed to its user's by Turtle beach. As a fact, it is the only soundcard I saw with a testing and troubleshooting wizard designed to make sure that everything has been correctly installed on your system. What a great idea, as a fact I really think that every other soundcard manufacturers should follow this example ! The next thing I noticed was the Music Games included with this installation. Even if they are mostly kids games, I think that they worth to be talked about because they are not only fun to play with but they are also very intelligently designed. As a fact, these games can even be used to learn a bit about how the music is written ! There are also more serious applications like the Midi Orchestrator plus which is a Midi sequence editor featuring countless functions to allow you the possibility to create your own Midi sequences by the mean of an external keyboard or simply edit any existing Midi files to your own tastes. Finally, the Voyetra AudioStation 2 included on the installation CD is a bit different with its more futuristic look. The AudioStation 2 icon is launching all the usual applications found on this world recognized audio application as well as it can also be used to launch anyone of the 9 specific audio applications included.

As a fact, the only missing feature I could think of on this soundcard were also not offered on the other Aureal 8820 Vortex audio Chipset based soundcard I tested. This mean that there are no tone controls to balance the bass and treble levels as well as no Wavetable manager. Perhaps that this is an indication that this oblivion may be coming from the manufacturer of this audio Chipset, I can't tell for sure but it really looks like it might be the answer of these missing features !

Now, let's talk about the overall quality of the Montego wavetable. I wouldn't say that the Montego wavetable is reproachless but I found nothing really annoying with this wavetable. As a fact, everything instruments are sounding very fine and are really pleasant to listen to.

By the way this is remembering me that this soundcard is exhibiting an astonishing 92db of signal to noise ratio which means that it is almost twice as better as the MagicWave signal to noise ratio ! Not bad, really not bad at all ! For those of you who don't have any knowledge about decibel logarithmic expressions all you have to know is that a difference of 3db means the double of the half of the next compared value. So, depending of the value expressed it can mean twice more or half less. For instance, a 90db signal to noise ratio compared to a 93db signal to noise ratio means that the first (90db) is two times noisier than the second or that the second (93db) is two times less (or half) noisy than the first.

The 3D capabilities of this soundcard are really worth mentioning. To get a good feeling of this additional sound sensation you will have to use 4 good speakers by placing 2 in front of you and 2 behind you, or ideally, use a good earphones set. I tested this feature while I was playing Battle Zone and I must really admit that it add a very interesting dimension to games but it is not as obvious on speakers as it is on earphones. However, the game need to be specifically designed with A3D sounds effects to take advantage of this feature so let's hope that there will be more and more games designed to use the A3D features of this new soundcard generation !

On the other hand, using this card to play DOS games is a snap whatever the way you choose to do it ! As a fact, I didn't changed a single thing to my setup and I took care of nothing since I uninstalled the MagicWave soundcard and replaced it with the Montego soundcard and I used to play any of my games in a DOS window, under Win95 DOS and even under the real DOS 6.22 without any problem at all !

To give you a better idea of the futuristic appearance of the Voyetra AudioStation included with this soundcard I included a screen shot of it for your viewing pleasure !



The next picture I included is about the excellent Midi Orchestrator plus which can be used to edit Midi file sequences.


I have been listening to digital audio extracted WAV files with a real pleasure while using this soundcard and in my opinion this soundcard does a very fantastic job when used to play such files. The audio reproduction of this soundcard is of very high quality. The fact that its signal to noise ratio is 92db contribute to a great level to the audio reproduction quality because the music is not corrupted by any background noises while the additional dynamic available give's more room to let the music breath.

The back panel of this soundcard is including a microphone input jack, a line input jack, a line output jack and a Midi/joystick connector.

The internal connectors of the card are including a CD audio input, a modem audio input and an auxiliary input. Another connector labeled "Wavetable Daughterboard connector" is also included and according to Turtle Beach it is WaveBlaster Compatible for connecting optional wavetable expansion card and to add an optional synthesizer module for enhanced MIDI playback such as the Yamaha XG50DB for instance.

My final word about this soundcard will be to tell you that this soundcard card come's with a very good and very clearly written user's manual as well as a bonus CD including the OEM version of the 3D game Battle Zone. Boy, I really love this game with its amazing 3D environment :-)


Addemdum

I have been searching a long long time for a serious software to test soundcards and untile now I found nothing worth using. However, a couple of days ago I finally found something. This software named SoundLab is actually performing a live spectral anlysis of soundcards and is reporting on a clear from results that are easily interpratable. As a fact the results given by this program are speaking by themself. Here is the actual spectral analyse of the Montegp soundcard as measured by Soundlab.


The strong points

The strong points of this soundcard are: the quality as well as the variety of all the audio applications included, the good overall quality of its wavetable, the excellent user's manual, the countless audio samples included and it superb signal to noise ratio.


The weak points

The weak point of this soundcard are: the absence of tone controls for the bass and treble levels adjustment, the lack of a wavetable manager and the slowing down of the booting process of Win95.


For aditionnal informations visit theTurtle Beach Montego home page.

Montego A3DXstream Sound Card Specifications

Bus Interface: PCI Bus master with 48 channel DMA interface ensures low system overhead for audio data transfers. Plug and Play compatible.

Compatibility: Windows 95/ NT/ 3.1/ 98 (Memphis) Plug & Play compatible.

Games Compatibility: Software compatible with most Sound Blaster™ Pro games in Windows DOS Box environment and in real mode DOS. Microsoft ® DirectSound™ Games in the Windows 95 environment.

Audio Converters: 18-bit ADC and DAC with sophisticated sample rate conversion for high quality digital mixing.

Signal to Noise: Better than 92dB (A weighted)

THD: Better than -92dB (0.005%) (A weighted)

Stereo Crosstalk: 100 Hz (-89dB); 1kHz (-90 dB); 10 kHz (-87 dB)

Frequency Response: 20 Hz - 20 kHz (+/-1 dB)

Sampling Rates: up to 48kHz in less than 3Hz steps.

Digital Audio Processor: Hardware full-duplex for simultaneous record/playback at full bandwidth with independent record/playback rate. Automuting after periods of digital silence. 16 hardware digital mixers for processing PCI audio streams.

Sample Rate Converters: 16 hardware-based sample rate converters for processing digital audio streams of different sample rates without imposing any CPU processing load.

Aureal A3D Interactive Sound: A3D positional audio enhancement when running A3D enhanced games.

Audio Inputs/ Outputs: Mono microphone input, stereo line input, stereo line output, stereo aux input on internal header, CD input on internal header, Modem audio in/out on internal header.

Wavetable Synthesizer: 64 voice advanced wavetable synthesis (32 hardware + 32 hardware accelerated software) with 4MB instrument samples stored in PC system RAM using dynamic caching to minimize RAM requirements for only the instruments being used. Reverberation and chorus on MIDI wavetable instruments.

Synthesizer daughter board connector: WaveBlaster™ Compatible for connecting optional wavetable expansion card.

MIDI Interface: Hardware-based MPU-401 MIDI UART-compatible interface through joystick connector.

Joystick interface: As well as providing standard analog/digital joystick support, the digital joystick further accelerates gameplay by performing remote polling of the joystick position without CPU intervention.

S/PDIF Expander port: Accepts optional S/PDIF expander card for recording and playback of pure digital audio.