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I'm a little confused by another review posted which said that the Tropez is Turtle Beach's entry level card. I'm not quite sure, since I have the Tropez Plus, but I'd be surprised if there were such a big difference between the Plus and the stadard. Back in 1998, when I was dreaming of having one of these $800 marvels, I was completely stunned when a co-worker gave me one!
It turns out that a customer (we were working in a computer store) got fed up with trying to set up the sound card drivers with his system and switched to an AWE32. Then my co-worker tried it, and his system choked and died on the card! He then asked if I wanted it, because he knew I wanted one.
I've been working on computers for many years now and consider myself to be the second most experienced computer technician I know (my co-worker being the most experienced). But that card had me producing expletives for over a year! I just couldn't get it to work right! Sometimes, it would work on every-other reboot. Sometimes I would get MIDI and no DSP.
It turns out my trouble was a combination of two things. Firstly, I was using DX 5ish, and I assumed that it knew what it was doing when it installed drivers. Secondly, when extracting the drivers I downloaded, I didn't use the -d (or whatever it was) command to extract the full path of the directories. Plus, I was extracting both into the same directory.
Since DX7 and 8, and since correctly extracting the drivers, I have installed this same card into probably thirty computers without any trouble.
Oddly, using the wrong drivers in Windows 98 gives me full duplex AND allows me to play multiple sounds at once (which is pretty good for an ISA card).
If you can find these cards for a few bucks, grab them, but be patient when setting up the drivers.
Most users (people who play games and MP3s) won't notice any advantage. In fact, most will be frustrated with having installed an enormous ISA card and not having voice polyphony.
These are the major benefits and their values:
Low (often not detectable) noise - Record and playback broadcast or recording quality sound Up to 16MB (maybe 52MB?) of wavetable - Record instruments into your wavetable (if you use MIDI, you know how valuable lots of recordable wavetable is) The WaveFront chip - This is by far the best sounding MIDI that has ever existed. Try playing an instrument on any other MIDI synthesizer and see if you can even identify it! On this card, not only can you identify each instrument, but in so many cases it has been impossible to differentiate between a MIDI file and a recorded orchestral production. (Of course, playing Super Mario Bros MIDI with portamento on the piano gives it away, haha.)
I give warning. This card is a little tough to install and has some limitations that the common user might resent. The benefits are, sadly, not found in any other card. I wish Turtle Beach would shed their combination inferiority/superiority complex and just make a simple PCI card with 16MB wavetable and the WaveFront chip.
The reason I give this much cursed card a rating of 5 is the benefits. (I'm not going to give a Corvette a low rating because there aren't back seats.)
As for this card being cheap, I've been searching for these things, hoping to find people getting rid of them for five to ten bucks, and so far I've regularly seen them for $700 and occasionally down as low as $379. Even the WaveFront chip alone (the Maui board) costs around $200.
I hope this review was helpful.
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