I bought a Santa Cruz today (well, Saturday) and Turtle Beach gets wicked points from me for their installation process. I don't think I've ever had any hardware install more easily. Uninstalled my Live! Value, opened up the case and swapped the cards. Boot up, cancel the XP hardware detection and install (exactly as described in the SC manual). Ran the newest driver installation I'd downloaded beforehand (rather than use the on-CD drivers), 2 minutes and several XP messages about new hardware, install is done. No rebooting, no instability, no failure to overwrite an older file.
New volume control icon in the system tray, hit that, set up my speakers, and I'm flying. There's also a "Sound Check" app included with the drivers, ran that just to be sure, everything checks out. MP3 plays fine, Unreal Tournament is great (in fact I hear MORE during the opening movie than I did with the Live!). The reason for the upgrade was because my speakers had started crackling, disabling the rear speakers cleaned it up mostly but the front speakers still did it. Driver update didn't help. Not happening so far with the Santa Cruz.
As I saw mentioned before, the volume IS quite a bit lower with the SC, but that's easily compensated for by turning up the speakers. I'd always thought the Live! put out too much volume anyway; I'd barely have the speaker control knob turned past the Off position and could be blown away. I expect this means the SC will have a smoother ramp to the max volume, and I'll be able to turn the knob farther before getting distortion and static.
Basically, so far, I'm recommending this to everyone that asks me about sound.
Oh yeah, I forgot to point out why exactly the driver installation was amazing to me. With the Live!, to install drivers in XP it has to reboot just to start the installation program. I'm assuming that's because something's in use and the installer can't just lock it and replace the file. Time will tell if the same thing happens with the SC with newer drivers, but I somehow doubt it.
New volume control icon in the system tray, hit that, set up my speakers, and I'm flying. There's also a "Sound Check" app included with the drivers, ran that just to be sure, everything checks out. MP3 plays fine, Unreal Tournament is great (in fact I hear MORE during the opening movie than I did with the Live!). The reason for the upgrade was because my speakers had started crackling, disabling the rear speakers cleaned it up mostly but the front speakers still did it. Driver update didn't help. Not happening so far with the Santa Cruz.
As I saw mentioned before, the volume IS quite a bit lower with the SC, but that's easily compensated for by turning up the speakers. I'd always thought the Live! put out too much volume anyway; I'd barely have the speaker control knob turned past the Off position and could be blown away. I expect this means the SC will have a smoother ramp to the max volume, and I'll be able to turn the knob farther before getting distortion and static.
Basically, so far, I'm recommending this to everyone that asks me about sound.
Oh yeah, I forgot to point out why exactly the driver installation was amazing to me. With the Live!, to install drivers in XP it has to reboot just to start the installation program. I'm assuming that's because something's in use and the installer can't just lock it and replace the file. Time will tell if the same thing happens with the SC with newer drivers, but I somehow doubt it.
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