In the beginning…

We used to own 16-bit sound cards with no special effects and considered ourselves lucky if half of the games supported sound. The times have changed and now we have feature laden, high quality sound cards with EAX 2.0 and A3D 2.0. That has forced me to find out if these next-generation sound cards can live up to their name. For this review I will be evaluating a heavily modified A3D 2.0 Sound Card from VoyetraTurtle Beach. The card that I am talking about is the Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla. This sound card is Turtle Beach's latest offering based on Aureal's Vortex 2 chipset. While it is much better than a card with just a reference design from Aureal, its heart is still an Aureal Vortex 2 chipset. The difference between the Quadzilla and the standalone Montego II is that Turtle Beach has added an expansion card, as well as a larger software bundle. While providing more plug-ins for speakers and a high quality S/PDIF it also makes the price higher, and takes up an extra case opening. Is it worth it?

Super Interesting Specs

PCI-3D Audio Accelerator
True four-speaker support for realistic quadraphonic audio
A3D 2.0 positional audio with S/PDIF digital output.
High-resolution, 18-bit converters: Record and play digital audio with the exceptional clarity at up to 48KHz sample rates.
Greater than 97 dB signal to noise ratio
Super low noise technology provides the ultimate in audio quality.
10 Band hardware equalizer for precision tone shaping
320 voice PCI wavetable synthesis
Direct Sound™ acceleration with multi-streaming bus-mastered PCI audio.
Supports all of the latest PC audio standards as well as DOS games.
Easy Installation: Fully Plug-and-Play compatible.
Game port fully supports Force Feedback joysticks.

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