Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card - help!

[goatweed]

So I upgraded the SB Live! card that came with my Dell to a TBSC card after getting so many rec's to do so. Anyway, the install went fine, and I have to admit my MP3's and CD's sounds amazing. It's the gaming aspect that's troubling me, however.

For some reason, the volume is there in games but the sound is a bit muffled - almost like the card is under-performing. Now I've preset the EQ with my settings and they stay consistent all the time as far as I can tell - and the games (specifically return to castle wolfenstein and UT2K3) don't have any funky audio settings other than to use high (22 khz) settings and/or enable EAX. Of course, I've tried each setting, played around with stuff, etc. but nothing seems to improve the sound quality. In another machine I have installed a SB Audigy card and side by side, it sounds way better for games. Is there something I'm doing wrong? I didn't install all of the software that came with the TBSC because it looked like recording studio/music mixing stuff and I really don't do any of that.

Thoughts?

 

Welcome to the world of outdated Sensaura. If you want to game with proper EAX support then Creative is the only game in town. Sensaura fixed alot of EAX issues in later buildsof Sensaura but Turtle Beach never incorporated them in the later Santa Cruz drivers due to licensing fees.

 

[Brian48]

Yep. I love my SC, but it's not the best in games, especially when EAX is involved. It's also got a very weak reverb engine which really doesn't help. I find for gaming, it's adequate for most purposes though.

Regarding UT2003, stick with software3d for audio. HW3d is not all that great and EAX flat out doesn't work in UT2003 with anything other than an Audigy/Audigy2 (it's in the readme.txt - uses EAX 3.0).

 

[goatweed]

Well I tried to play with the card some more last night, evern downloaded a set of Beta drivers they had on their site, but there was no difference in sounds in so far as games are concerned. I switched to software mode under UT2K3, but it didn't sound nearly as good as it did on my old machine. I also found out that Turtle Beach is no longer making sound cards, which didn't make me anymore happier, because that means support (i.e. new drivers) will be far and few, if at all.

Anyway, I returned it to CC, exchanged it for an Audigy card (it was the same price) and all is well. Thanks for the replies!