Turtle Beach Systems

Turtle Beach Systems
Headquarters Valhalla, New York
Parent Voyetra Turtle Beach
Website http://www.turtlebeach.com

Turtle Beach Systems is an American sound card and headset manufacturer. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc which is headquartered in Valhalla, New York.

History

Turtle Beach [1] was founded in 1985[2] as "Turtle Beach Softworks" by co-founders Roy Smith and Robert Hoke. The company's first product was a graphical editing system that supported the breakthrough Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. The Mirage was the first low cost sampling device that allowed musicians to play realistic choirs, pianos, horns, and other instruments in their performances. The software, called "Vision", connected the Mirage to a PC and used the PC's screen and graphics to make the programming and editing of sounds much easier. Ensoniq decided to resell Vision through their dealer network and Turtle Beach Softworks became a profitable company.

Over the following years, the company developed a few other programs that supported Ensoniq equipment but realized that they needed to develop more generalized products. They retooled their product into "SampleVision", which initially supported the Akai S900, but was designed with an extensible framework, allowing other samplers to be supported. The SampleVision series was among the first to offer a Macintosh-like user experience on the PC (which at that time did not have Microsoft Windows to provide its GUI).

In 1988, Turtle Beach began to work on developing its first hardware product, a hard disk based audio editing system. Among the first of its kind, the product was named the "56K digital recording system" and was released in 1990. It was based on a Motorola 56000 DSP chip, and offered non linear playlist editing of stereo audio files. The 56K system was popular among radio stations and mastering studios because it replayed exactly the same digital stream that it recorded.

In 1990, Turtle Beach began developing its first PC sound card. This card used high quality A/D and D/A, a high quality synthesizer from eMu, and an onboard DSP chip. This product was called "MultiSound." The MultiSound product competed with more established products of the day from Advanced Gravis (now defunct), Ad Lib, Inc. (now defunct), Creative Labs, and Media Vision (now defunct). CCRMA's Music Kit and DSP Tools running on Motorola 56001 DSP, initially developed for NeXTcube system, was later ported on NeXTSTEP with Turtle Beach Fiji/Pinnacle DSP cards.[3]

Turtle Beach was then acquired by Integrated Circuit Systems (ICS), a maker of clock chips for the PC market. ICS wanted to broaden its market to include the new multimedia chips and peripherals, deciding to buy existing lines rather than build anew.

With the addition of ICS's resources, Turtle Beach offered a full line of PC peripherals, releasing 8 new products within the 18 months following the sale. The MultiSound Monterey, The Tahiti, Maui, Audio Advantage sound cards rounded out its hardware product line, with products at every price point. On the software side, the company released "Wave for Windows", a sound editing program that was ahead of its time, but also ahead of the hardware curve; "Quad", the first multitrack recording application for the PC; and several other software titles.

As often occurs with corporate acquisitions, the original founders were soon no longer with the company. Martin Goldberg was brought in to run the company and after moving its operations to San Jose, ICS sold Turtle Beach to Voyetra Technologies, Inc. in 1996.

Voyetra's Midi Orchestrator Plus Software bundled with Sound Blaster Cards from Creative

Voyetra, founded by synthesizer pioneer Carmine Bonanno in 1975, had developed drivers and software for nearly every sound card manufacturer in the world during the early 1990s. The purchase of Turtle Beach allowed Voyetra to leverage its close ties with PC manufacturers by providing sound cards bundled with Voyetra software and drivers. After the purchase, the company changed its name to Voyetra Turtle Beach, Inc. and sold millions of sound cards to Dell Computer under the Turtle Beach brand.

In 2001, Voyetra Turtle Beach developed [AudioTron], one of the first standalone Internet audio receivers. The device enjoyed tremendous success in the first year of its release, but was soon faced with tremendous competition from similar products. Turtle Beach opted out of the network audio market in 2004.

Recently, Turtle Beach has diversified its product line to include USB audio devices, video capture products and a wide variety of headphones, including the Ear Force line of multi-channel PC and gaming headphones.

Headsets

Turtle Beach has an extensive line of headsets, their current line has headsets for current and previous generation consoles such as the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3. They also sell headsets compatible with PC/Mac and mobile platforms and Nintendo consoles.

Current line-up

Brands

A Catalina brand card

Sound cards

ISA bus

Multisound family, Hurricane architecture:

Multisound family, 2nd generation architecture:

Other:

Wavetable Daughter Board

PCMCI bus

PCI bus

Montego A3DXstream

Part Number : TBS-0660-01V

USB bus

Headsets

EAR Force – Line of gaming headsets for most gaming platform such as; PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii. Models available range from wired stereo headsets for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, to wireless models with Dolby Digital decoding for Xbox 360 and PS3. Features include Chat Boost (boosts chat level if soundtrack gets loud), mic monitoring, etc. All current models are as followed (Xbox 360) X41, DX11, X31, PX21, X11, X12, XLC, PX5, (PS3/PS4 compatible) X41/PBT, DPX21, PX21, P11, DP11 PBT, PX5, (Wii) W3, D2, (PC) HPA2, Z2, and Z1

Software

56K – The 56K Digital Recording System was the first of the Turtle Beach audio systems for the IBM PC platform. It made use of the Motorola 56000 Digital Signal Processor for accelerating digital audio data transfers through the IBM PC's ISA bus. The 56K was designed to be connected to the AES-EBU or S/PDIF jacks on a professional DAT recorder. With the included SoundStage graphical audio editing software, a 56K system installed in a 286, 386 or 486 Intel PC running Windows 3.0 or 3.1 can be used as a complete post-production digital audio editing solution. The 56K system consisted of three major components:

  1. The 56K-PC Digital Signal Processor Card (a 16-bit digital audio processor on a full-length ISA board).
  2. The 56K-D Digital Interface Box, which allows your DAT machine to talk to the computer via AES/EBU or S/PDIF-compatible digital formats.
  3. The SoundStage digital audio editing software.

Quad – 4-track recording software for PC meant to somewhat mimic a 4-track cassette recorder.[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Turtle Beach
  2. ↑ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/turtle-beach
  3. ↑ "Computer Music Hardware and Software", CCRMA OVERVIEW, CCRMA, Stanford University, 2000 (also available in scanned PDF)
  4. ↑ Quad FAQ

External links

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