TerraTec Electronic has its headquarters located in Nettetal on the lower Rhine near the cities of Düsseldorf and Mönchengladbach, and in the immediate vicinity of the Dutch town of Venlo. It develops and sells sound cards and multimedia products. The company is also active in the fields of PC speech recognition, TV tuner cards and Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

TerraTec is most famous for their EWS soundcards. EWS is an acronym for EierlegendeWollmilchSau, a German idiomatic expression literally translated as ‘Egg laying, wool covered milk giving sow’ or, in other words, ‘multifunction’. Multifunction here means a single soundcard that includes the most common requirements for MIDI and music production in a PC environment so it's not a product line aimed for gamers. For the gaming market Terratec decided to launch a new product line XLerate, where the first card called XLerate used the Vortex1 and now XLerate Pro that uses the Vortex2 chip. Let’s have a look at the XLerate Pro.

Technical Overview:

Vortex 2 Features

Terratec's XLerate Pro uses Aureal’s Vortex 2 SuperQuad reference board (literally) just like Xitel's Storm Platinum, Videologic's SonicVortex2 and of course Aureal with their own System Integrator board. Diamond and Turtle Beach are the only two to Vortex 2 partners to alter the reference design.

Just like all other Vortex 2 boards XLerate Pro offers these key features:

• 96 DirectSound (i.e., they can all be DirectSound if necessary) streams;
• 76 3D streams* (they can be A3D, DS3D, or A3D 2.0, in the case of A3D 2.0, they are currently split between direct path and reflective sounds (16+60);
• 64 Wavetable voices

The different types of streams can be mixed and matched in various ways, but they always have to add up to a maximum of 96. Note that there are other types of streams (e.g. wavOut) but these are the common ones.

*76 3D streams for DS3D and A3D 1.x are accessible using Aureal’s 2035 reference drivers which have enabled 76 3D steams for 2 speaker and headphone modes but not four speaker modes. The actual shipping XLerate Pro drivers are based on the 2016 drivers. Terratec use of the reference design is perfect for all those power gamers who just can’t wait for custom drivers and all you "lose" in the transition are some minor cosmetic changes from the Terratec drivers. I.e they don’t say Terratec at the top!

• 96dB signal-to-noise ratio over a 20Hz~22kHz range;
• custom crosstalk cancellation circuitry using a biquad crossover filter to optimize left and right sound channels for more effective A3D playback in stereo speakers;
• Sound Blaster Pro DOS support;
• hardware and 256 software wavetable voices using advanced techniques, such as fourth-order interpolation and sweepable filters with resonance;
• effects for delay, room, chamber, hall, cabinet, flange, distortion, and wah-wah on the wavetable;
• support for DLS 1.0;
• a hardware wavetable header;
• a gameport which as well as supporting standard analog/digital joysticks and MPU-401 MIDI I/O, also incorporates DirectX acceleration circuitry that accelerates DirectX gameplay and improves system speed by 10% or more
• four speaker support out of the box;
• hardware support for DS, DS3D, A3D 1.x, A3D 2.0 and planned support for EAX through a future driver upgrade.
• 18 bit DAC
• TOSLINK optical S/PDIF out
• Digital expansion header

If you are looking for digital connectivity and can use a optical connector then the XLerate Pro has one built in. Most MiniDisc players has optical connection, some use the COAX input and others actually have both. It's the same for home theater speakers as some use optical, some use COAX and some use both. For example, Cambridge Soundworks uses a coax connector and Videologic uses both so if digital connectivity is important to you be sure and keep this in mind as the best Vortex 2 choice if you need a COAX connector is currently Voyetra Turtle Beach’s Quadzilla and if you need both, Voyetra Turtle Beach also makes a bracket board with coax and optical I/Os plus the option of the full Home Studio Edition. For the XLerate Pro you also have the option of using one of the optical to coax converters on the market but they are pretty expensive (around the same price as a Vortex 2 board) so not really worth it for this purpose in our opinion.

An example of a converter can be found at Midiman and comes with an $80 price tag.

All things being equal, if you need the digital output and can use an optical connector instead of a COAX you are two step ahead of Diamond which offers the MX25 for $40 and one step ahead of Turtle Beach which goes the bracket board route at no extra cost but takes up more space.

My big issue with the bracket board approach is space. As I noted in the Quadzilla review, slots are at a premium in my machine and I hate to give up a slot for the sake of external outputs when all I want to do is play games. However, Turtle Beach had several other reasons for going this route, including upgradability for their Dell buyers and you can read about them in our Quadzilla review. Voyetra Turtle Beach, despite being late to the market has also delivered what they promised.