Turtle Beach and XP

Since the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card is the Official Sound Card of Quarter to Three, and since I am nearly the last person to make the jump to XP, I bring this to you guys:

Windows XP doesn’t like my Santa Cruz. It worked beautifully under 98, but upon installation of XP, I have no sound. I installed all the drivers, ran the configuration, nothing is muted, everything is plugged in properly.

Yet, nothing. Quiet as death itself.

Ideas/suggestions welcome.

ECSK7AMA
Athlon XP 2100+
512MB RAM
GeForce 2 Ti, 64MB
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

You did, uh, download the latest drivers, right?

I’ve got one of these running in a Shuttle Athlon64 cube running Windows XP. It works quite well.

Yup, newest drivers I found. Over the Turtle Beach website, the only WinXP drivers I saw.

Sorry I didn’t state that first, but yeah – unless I got the wrong drivers, or something. Guess I’ll look a little closer tonight. But all the driver utilities say that it should be working. :(

Check that your speakers are plugged into the right output. The outputs can be customized in the little applet that gets installed so you may want to check that out as well. Make sure things aren’t muted or that you don’t have the level on wave output too low or even all the way down. Check the IRQ make sure it isn’t sharing, maybe change the slot it is in either way.

– Xaroc

It probably doesn’t help that there are like three separate volume controls, e.g. the WinXP control, the Sound Card control, and then app. specific volume controls, not to mention the hardware control.

Yeah, my only other thought is to make sure everything looks okay in the Turtle Beach control applet, what with the proper speaker config, etc. I haven’t had any problem with the Turtle Beach card, in contrast to my old Sound Blaster which gave me no end of problems.

  • Alan

Aha!!!

Control Panel -> Sounds

I can choose which driver. It was trying to send all audio through my motherboard’s onboard device. Stupid Windows!! :-)

Fixed. I rule!

You should disable the onboard sound in the bios if you haven’t already.

– Xaroc

Yeah, I had, I’m 99% certain. I’m gonna double-check, but I swear I’d done that.

I’ve read reports of XP detecting stuff like that even if it’s disabled in the BIOS, so I think that’s what’s going on.