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Part of being considered an "Audiophile" is never quite being completely happy with what you have, always changing and incessantly tweaking components. I honestly did not expect a whole lot of difference when comparing the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card to the Creative Sound Blaster Live. I expected the only real difference to be that my particular SB Live card is an older one that does not support 5.1 six-speaker systems. I was amazed when I could hear a noticeable difference between the two as soon as I replaced the SB Live with the Santa Cruz. The normal hiss that told us the speakers were on was gone. The highs seemed less stressed and the sub bass was tight yet had a definite punch. While playing waves and games, there are some noticeable artifacts with the SB Live card. These artifacts really jumped out at us during the Audio Bench tests. The drum roll during the CPU utilization test had very noticeable squeaky artifacts that the Santa Cruz did not have. Stereo and front to rear separation were the same between the two cards and both were far superior to the onboard Avance AC97 audio with the Realtek audio chip. I will be short and concise about the onboard audio. If you have cheap little speakers and do not want loud and accurate sound for music and DVD playback, then it is fine. It works and if you are on a budget and prefer not to buy a separate sound card, it will be adequate until you listen to a better system. The onboard sound with my Klipsch Pro Media speakers plugged into it, distorted easily and had generally poor quality sound. There was no noticeable hiss, but the frequency response was poor and anything above medium volume levels produced very noticeable harmonic distortion. The CPU utilization results will not be posted as it had no hardware voices available and thus the results were corrupted.
On it's own, the Santa Cruz calls itself an audiophile card. Having a 96 dB signal to noise ratio and high-resolution filters lend credence to this claim. It combines DSP and 5.1, six-speaker compatibility with a simple all in one card. This is done with the Versa jack on the card that is configurable through the easy to use Santa Cruz Control Panel to be an input or output and digital or analog.
This control panel also provides digital signal processing for sound effects such as live room, concert hall, alley, etc. The Santa Cruz control panel does not have as many different types of settings as the EAX of the Sound Blaster, but is sufficient. The 3D audio is compatible with A3D 1.0, EAX1.0/2.0, IA3D, MacroFX, MultiDrive, Virtual Ear, plus the HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function), which is 3D audio that simulates four speaker positional audio with two speakers or headphones and the Virtual Ear software should make tweaking for headphones especially nice.
Click to view largerA mixer for controlling levels of inputs and outputs and simple control of front, rear, center and subwoofer levels is also included. This is an all in one, easy to use, program that has a relatively small footprint. The Santa Cruz software does not include any special task bars or other bloat ware or mandatory registration reminders to be loaded at start up. The mixer actually replaces the standard small but barren Windows mixer and volume control which returns to normal immediately if you exit the Santa Cruz control software. I found it easy to install and it wasn't hard to use. The control panel is not only useful but also very versatile. This software makes it easy to change from five to six speakers, with or without virtual 5.1 and change DSP effects and equalization all on the fly.
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I found the reproduction of CD's, on disk CDA, MP3, and waves to be impeccable and extremely high in quality. Recordings made from CD's were excellent and high quality as well. So enough with the chitchat lets look at our test system configuration and see how the cards and onboard audio compare.
MSI KT3 Ultra main board
AMD Athlon 2200+
1024 MB PC2700 RAM
Radeon 7200 Video card
80GB Maxtor Harddrive
Windows 2000 Professional
Enermax 430 watt power supply
For comparison of the SB Live, Santa Cruz and Onboard Audio, I will run the Ziff Davis Media Audio Winbench99. This benchmarks runs a gamut of user and automated tests at different audio settings. We will be starting with subjective sound tests. These tests are subjective because not everyone will be able to hear the difference and some will not care. These tests run several different environmental effects to which the listener has to choose the position, direction and orientation of sounds being played.
The first subjective test was of breaking glass. In this test, I was faced with the task of determining where the glass is being broken. There are several variations, which include Front Left Top/Bottom, Front Right Top/Bottom, Rear Left Top/Bottom and finally Rear Right Top/Bottom. To be honest it was extremely hard to discern from the front and back on both of these cards and with the onboard audio, it was impossible. Listening to the glass break, we were able to tell Front left and right and even top and bottom but there was hardly any separation in the rear tests.
The second subjective test was the Direct Sound 3D Train (Doppler) Test. In this test, the listener simply sits back and listens to a train drive by from front to rear and then from rear to front. The effects of a passing train were reproduced in amazing detail. From the sound of the engine to the sounds of the steam whistle and the clickity-clack of the track as the train rolled by. Each of these was reproduced with realism by the SB Live and Santa Cruz cards yet the onboard audio fell short again.
The third subjective test was the Direct Sound 3D Helicopter Circle, Horizontal. Again, I have the task of deciding if the helicopter is flying in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction horizontally around us. This is the first test that is scored and with both cards, we were able to score 100 (out of 100). We were only able score a 25 with the onboard audio.
The fourth subjective test was the Direct Sound 3D Helicopter Circle, Vertical. Now the helicopter is flown in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction vertically around us. Again, I was able to score a perfect 100 with both cards and a 50 with the onboard audio.
At this point, the subjective tests were a dead heat between the SB Live and Santa Cruz as far as determining directional effects, position and orientation of sounds being played. It was truly amazing to see how far short the onboard audio fell in comparison with these simple sound reproductions. It makes you wonder if your onboard audio may be causing you to be fragged while gaming. The one thing at this point that did stand out was the sharpness and crispness of the Santa Cruz during all these tests.
From here, we head into the automated sound testing. Running a range of sounds produced at different frequencies, sound bits and multiple voices allows us to see what type of CPU utilization is required to reproduce these sounds. Without boring you with a result-by-result description, we have provided you with a chart that lists the results from the SB Live and the Santa Cruz sound cards. I didn't include the onboard audio results, because according to the readme file included with the audio benchmark, the onboard audio doesn't support multiple voices and the results returned are corrupt. After viewing the results, we have determined that this is correct. Below is the chart with all the results listed. A little warning before you click on the chart. It's pretty big so you will have to scroll left to right to read everything but I think you will find it's worth the effort.
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Price wise the Santa Cruz is equal to the Audigy, and we will be comparing these two head to head in the near future. What this comes down to is whether it is worth the upgrade. My subjective opinion is yes, if you are one who notices noise and artifacts and/or you are concerned with the sound quality of your music play back. The low harmonic distortion levels and high signal to noise ratio easily makes it worth the price in my opinion.
If you play games that are resource intensive and are looking for better performance and lower CPU utilization, then the Santa Cruz is definitely the better investment. You can see from these tests that the Santa Cruz uses a lot less CPU power than the SB Live. If you have or plan to have very good speakers, you plan to listen to music and/or DVDs and you want excellent sound and performance for them and your games, then I would opt for the Turtle Beach card. The system requirements for this card are a PC with 2.1 compliant PCI slot, K6 2 200 or equivalent and at least 64MB of RAM.
Some people may point out that this is not a fair test because the Sound Blaster Live is an older model with older technology and the Santa Cruz card should be compared to the Sound Blaster Audigy which is more comparable in price. This is true; however, there are reasons for the comparison. Many people who want to upgrade from a generic or "economy" card and even a SB Live would like to know how these two cards compare. In the near future, we shall be comparing the Audigy to the Santa Cruz. In the mean time, if you would like to reference some highly technical tests and specifications on the Sound Blaster Live and the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, look to www.pcavtech.com . Arny Kruegar has a lot of technical information on these two and many other sound cards that may be of interest to you.
