Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Sound Card: Digital-Camera-Near.com

Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Sound Card

Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Sound Card
by TURTLE BEACH SYSTEMS

List Price: ~~$69.29~~
Category: CE
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Buy Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Sound Card at Amazon.com

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Customers in the UK, Buy this product at amazon.co.uk for British Pounds

Digital Photo Product Details

Manufacturer: TURTLE BEACH SYSTEMS
Format: CD
Platform: Windows
Model: TBS-3300
Product features:

Also features normal PC surround sound outputs (Front Out, Rear Out, Sub/Center Out, & Back Out)
Mic In, Line In
Requires an available PCI interface slot

Accessories:

Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Sound Card

Customer Review: An exercise in futility and frustration
Summary: 1 Stars

I got this card to process sound so that I could bypass the Dolby Digital onboard sound chip on my computer's motherboard. The plan was for the Montego DDL card to improve game performance by routing sound through the card instead of the motherboard. Since the Montego DDL also delivers Dolby Digital, I would continue to get good sound when playing movies.

I'm used to Dolby Digital hookups, installing expansion cards, driver software, and so on, and installing the card was easy. Configuring it was not. The card did not work at all at first. I spent several hours going through the documentation on the Turtle Beach website, following various troubleshooting directions, until I found that I had an IRQ conflict, meaning that the sound card must be installed in a PCI slot that isn't devoted to another resource. The fix: either configure my motherboard to devote the sound card to a single IRQ, or remove and reinstall the card (including the drivers) repeatedly until I found a PCI slot where there was no conflict. This is the level of technical detail you must be prepared to deal with if you purchase this card.

Another recent reviewer expressed disappointment with the driver software that comes with the card - I had the same bad experience. After much trial and error working with the Turtle Beach control panel, I finally got Dolby Digital sound. During this exercise, I found many bugs in the Turtle Beach control panel, the worst of which caused my PC to crash if I opened the control panel while playing a movie. Another annoying bug was a "processing error" message I received when checking for software updates via the TB control panel.

Back to the Turtle Beach website, where I found updated drivers, and yet another uninstall/re-install exercise. The March 2006 drivers fixed the control panel problems I was having. But now, the card no longer delivers Dolby Digital sound! This latest problem will probably be fixed in an upcoming driver release, but that won't matter to me because I'm returning mine to Amazon tomorrow.

I wasted almost 2 days messing around with a product that is not ready for prime time. Turtle Beach obviously released the card too early, and the unlucky folks who are buying it now are paying for the fixes to their horrible software drivers. This sort of thing happens too often in the computer peripheral business.

This card may be worth buying in a year or so, but for now, forget it.

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