Turtle Beach Sounds Off

Sound card supplier, Turtle Beach Systems, is re-entering the low-cost sound market with its newly available Daytona PCI card for around US$100.

One innovative feature of the board is Downloadable Sounds (DLS) acceleration. What does this do in English? Carmine J. Bonanno, president and CEO of Voyetra Technologies Inc., explains, "DLS lets the new generation of Windows games and Internet applications load their own custom sounds into the wave-table synthesizer so the MIDI music and effects will sound exactly as intended. DLS is all about consistent playback on any system configuration. It eliminates the limitation of having to rely on the General MIDI palette."

Features for the board include: support for Microsoft's DirectSound technology, SoundBlaster Pro use in a Windows DOS box, the option for operation with older ISA-based boards (it doesn't fully support DOS titles), a hardware wave-table synthesis engine with reverb and chorus, SRS(R) 3D Audio, high-quality 16-bit Sigma/Delta Codec, a speed-compensated joystick interface, and support for both Windows 95 and NT.

For gamers who love their original sound cards but want to take advantage of newer technologies under Windows, this may be a cheaper alternative than buying one of the newer, more expensive sound boards.