Since the demise of Aureal six months ago, the sound card market has seemingly fallen into Creative Labs' hands. Even before they purchased Aureal's assets a month ago, Creative Labs' huge presence in the sound card industry was undisputed. Nonetheless, there are still other smaller, yet important sound card players in today's market. One of these companies is Turtle Beach, a company that arguably has one of the best reputations in the industry, rivaling that of even Creative Labs.
Turtle Beach has a long history of producing high quality audio cards.
Its latest offering, the Santa Cruz, attempts to bring all of the company's past experience together into an all-encompassing 5.1 speaker sound card. This is a major benefit for those who have been looking for an easy way to hook up their home theatre speaker systems to their computer. Santa Cruz's extra output is definitely a step up. In comparison, most sound cards only offer two analog outputs, and possibly a digital output. With 5.1 surround decoding done on the card versus an external decoder, Santa Cruz buyers are liberated of another piece of equipment to buy.