Fremont, CA — Turtle Beach has announced a new series of digital audio cards for Windows and PowerPC platforms. The Pro Series cards are based on Turtle Beach’s MultiSound® family of sound boards. They will feature a digital I/O option at a lower cost than any other board on the market.

The company states that the new cards feature superior signal to noise ratios and optional digital outputs, along with the impressive analog audio quality for which Turtle Beach has become famous.

According to Turtle Beach representative Seth Dotterer, the new cards will appeal to a major niche market. “The main market is going to be semi-pro musicians and recordists, people with advanced home studios, multimedia developers,” he says. “They aren’t in the same class as professional DAW hardware, but they’ll go head-to-head with products like CardD® and CardD Plus [Digital Audio Labs], at a much lower price.”

The flagship of the Pro Series, due to ship in September, is the MultiSound Pinnacle. The Pinnacle will provide superior audio (greater than -97dB S/N) from a 20-bit DAC, and Turtle Beach Hurricane Architecture for high data transfer rates. This card includes the Kurzweil MASS® Synth with channelized MIDI effects.

Other features include Windows Plug’n’Play® compatibility, upgradeable sample RAM, and a daughter board connector for an optional second synthesizer. The MultiSound Pinnacle will be bundled with Voyetra’s Digital Orchestrator Plus sequencing and editing software. It’s expected to carry a street price of approximately $429 (US).

For those just need the digital audio capabilities of the Pinnacle without the MIDI synth features, Turtle Sound is introducing the MultiSound Fiji. It will be released within several weeks of the Pinnacle. The Fiji’s digital audio capabilities are identical to the Pinnacle, and its street price is expected to fall under $300 (US).

A Pro Series Digital I/O daughter board will be available as an add-on for both the Fiji and the Pinnacle. The daughter board will provide digital input and output with zero generation loss. The card will also be sold as a pre-installed option on both of the boards. It is expected to add about $70 to the retail cost.

The final card in the Pro Series is the MultiSound Catalina, to be released in the first quarter of 1997. It will use PCI Bus architecture. It includes multiple input/output channels, digital I/O, and all the digital audio characteristics of the Fiji. The Catalina contains no MIDI synth; however a WaveBlaster® header is provided on the card.

Turtle Beach has been in the music and recording business for nearly a decade, and has established its reputation as an industry leader. It was the first company to introduce a 16 bit sound card, the first to introduce wavetable synthesis on a multimedia sound card, and the first to introduce wavetable instrument sampling on a sound card.

Syracuse, NY. C-Span recently took delivery of its first Wheatstone console, the SP-8 television audio console. The new console will be used in C-Span’s Studio Control Room #2, which is currently under construction and scheduled to be on-air by October of this year.

The SP-8 offers the mix/minus capability necessary for C-Span programming with multiple live shots, remotes, and call-ins. “The SP-8 is the only console we found within our price range that had all the flexibility, user friendliness and features we were looking for,” said Dave Roycraft, C-Span Manager of Corporate Engineering. “Our operators are anxious to being working with it.

“We needed a console that operators could learn easily, but also a console that had all of the features we need for our live productions,” Roycraft continued. “Other consoles that provided the same flexibility in terms of features were much more complicated than the SP-8 to operate.”

Roycraft said the network was looking for a console as easy to operate as the old console in C-Span’s Studio Control Room #1, but in a newer and more feature-rich model. “The console in Studio Control Room #1 is our daily workhorse,” said Roycraft. “We receive a lot of call-ins through that room. We anticipate that the SP-8 will become our new workhorse.”

Roycraft also stated that another factor in Wheatstone’s favor was the overwhelmingly positive review the company received from other broadcasters. “Everyone that had first-hand experience with Wheatstone consoles said, ‘They work great and never break.’ They have an excellent reputation.”

The SP-8 console incorporates many of the features of Wheatstone’s higher-end audio consoles in a lower cost model. Technology available in Wheatstone’s high-end TV-600 audio control console, such as an eight-input per channel overbridge, a complete switch selectable internal logic structure, mix-minus capability, and group muting are all available on the SP-8.