We are going to look at a couple of new products that aim to shake things up. Specifically we are going to look at the Voyetra Turtle Beach (VTB) Santa Cruz and the VideoLogic SonicFury. From a hardware perspective, the products are identical. What differs is the name, the bundle and the distribution. Turtle Beach and VideoLogic have agreed to a cross-distribution alliance, increasing the availability of the companies’ PC audio hardware products on a worldwide scope. Turtle Beach will now distribute five models of VideoLogic speakers in North America, while VideoLogic will distribute the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz™ audio accelerator in Europe and Australia.

The cards use a new DSP from Cirrus Logic / Crystal Semiconductors, a company that has for quite sometime been a major player in the PC sound chips market but the last few years only in the less exciting PC OEM. In an interview last fall with David Crowell, Product Marketing Manager for Computer Audio products at Cirrus Logic / Crystal Audio, we got the first hint of what was then things to comes. The things are of course the Santa Cruz and SonicFury that uses the Crystal CS4630 DSP as well as a new card from Terratec and another from Hoontech that uses the CS4624 DSP.

The CS4630 chip is really the first chip that offers something beyond what we have already seen in the second-generation PCI soundcards. When we talk about generations of PCI soundcards we include the Vortex1, original Monster Sound and some others in the first generation. They all offered 8 3D streams and lacks support for environmental audio effects (e.g. EAX and A3D2/3’s wavetracing).  In the second generation we include cards that support at least 16 3D streams and support the wavetracing of A3D2 and/or EAX. This includes all cards using the Vortex2, Emu10k1, Canyon3d, 4DWave, FM801, YMF744/754, Thunderbird 3D and a few others. 

What will be considered the 3^rd generation is too early to tell but there are a couple of features which appear to set this chip apart from the second generation. First, the flexibility of the DSP which can, for example, be changed from accelerating 32 3D sound streams with full EAX 2.0 support, to decoding MP3s in hardware, to doing microphone echo cancellation or, to accelerating up to 64 MIDI voices is sure to turn some heads.

Secondly, the back panel of the two cards sports what Voyetra Turtle Beach and VideoLogic have called a VersaJack. The VersaJack is a 1/8'' mini jack that can be configured either as a digital output, a secondary line input, a stereo headphone output or a center/subwoofer output, while conserving real-estate (no extra bracket board that blocks using a PCI slot) and cost. While the Santa Cruz / Sonic Fury is not the first six channel sound card, it is the first 6 channel card to offer a full range of advanced features.

The other new feature that makes its debut on these cards is Sensaura’s Virtual Ear technology. We will get into this in more detail in the review but in brief, Virtual Ear allows the user to customize the way the 3D audio is generated to their ear and head shape, which in theory should result in better performance. It’s worth noting here that Sensaura’s Virtual EAR is now available as an upgrade for $25 directly from Sensaura’s website for motherboards using ADI SoundMAX 2 and sound cards and motherboards using the Yamaha YMF 724, 744 (and likely 754) chips.

In this review we will take an in-depth look at the feature set of the VideoLogic SonicFury (available in Australia, New Zealand or Europe) to see if what looks to be an innovative feature set on paper translates to real world benefits. If you are in North America  you will want to check out our very similar review of the Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.  One other thing we will mention up front is this is a very lengthy review.   If you don't want to read a lot then you can head straight to the last page for the overall summary, but you will by doing so miss out on the in-depth detail.

Update - January 2, 2001:  At the end of this review you will find undated test results based on the latest driver. The overall review has not yet been revised to reflect the performance of the new drivers and the update makes reference to the sections of the main review so it will be very beneficial to read the whole review, especially since the update on focuses on issues.

Technical Overview --->