The circuit board features the Aureal Semiconductor AU8820 single chip PCI audio accelerator, and although there are other, cheaper soundcards that use it, Turtle Beach have also included the SigmaTel STAC9701T chip, which provides high‑quality 18‑bit converters. In common with most other PCI soundcards, the Montego is petite (scarcely five inches long), and no‑one should have any problems installing it. Included in the bundle is MIDI Orchestrator Plus, a comprehensive MIDI sequencing package which includes piano roll, notation, event list, and even SysEx editing. However, contrary to some rumours, this form of audio acceleration will not help people running DirectX plug‑in effects. This applies to any application that comes with DirectX 5.0, such as Sonic Foundry's Acid (see review starting on page 176). If an application uses multitrack audio, and would normally carry out the mixing using DirectSound, then CPU overhead with the Montego installed should be significantly lower. Because of this extra hardware, the Montego can offer full‑duplex recording (for simultaneous recording and playback) with independent sample rates. There are 16 hardware‑based sample‑rate converters for processing multiple streams of audio, along with 16 hardware digital mixers. This last aspect is intriguing, and derives from the fact that there is extra hardware on the card that bypasses the normal DirectSound drivers of DirectX 5.0, thus lowering CPU overhead. In the light of this specification, £120 seems a small price to pay, especially as the Montego is a PCI card which also claims to be an Audio Accelerator. Their new Montego A3D Xstream has 64‑voice wavetable synthesis (using 4Mb of your system RAM), 18‑bit converters, Aureal 3D positional sound, DOS game compatibility, a Waveblaster‑compatible daughterboard socket, and (at some point in the future) an optional S/PDIF interface. Turtle Beach have been producing high‑quality soundcards for years.

Despite the large number of professional soundcards appearing over the last year, there is still great demand for good, audio‑quality cards that remain compatible with DOS‑based games, and which don't break the bank.

Turtle beach montego ddl review