Installation issue with Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card?
 

Hi All,

I am bringing this issue up in capture/record because I am installing a Turtle Beach Sound Card in advance of receiving an ATI AIW USB capture unit. From what I understand the Turtle beach sound card works well with the ATI unit.

I am having trouble installing the TB card on my computer.

Pentium 4
Windows XP SP3

I downloaded and installed the drivers from this site as posted by Lordsmurf here :

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/comp...tle-beach.html

. . . but I can't get the software to communicate with the card.

Attached is the screen capture from running TB's sound check - after I have installed the card with the drivers.

Have any of you seen this before?

I have uninstalled and re-installed a few times now. . .

Thanks,
22west

I have a small collection of TB SC cards and their driver discs.

I do not know your specific problem, but running it on a old install of XP SP3 could cause it.

First (Be sure to backup your install of XP SP3) re-activating an install of XP is no longer a certain thing. In particular make a copy of the wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files in C:\Windows\system32 put them some place "safe" in case you have to restore them to re-activate your working system.

Second, it would probably be best to buy an entirely different disk just to "Test" install versions of XP, or that you can wipe and restore to from a backup (when) it gets corrupt or damaged.. it will happen.. its just part of the XP generation of softwares. I use a Samsung EVO SSD.

Installing a fresh copy of XP SP2 is probably "best". The XP SP3 installed quite a few new things that interfere with earlier software. In particular aggressive anti-malware you will find difficult to shut off. Then install the TB SC software from the CDROM. Only install the Device Drivers portion, which also installs the control panel applications.

There are a few "versions" of the TB SC install CDROM, the card was released before 2000 for the Win98, ME, 2000 generations of operating software. WinXP was included by releasing a later version of the CDROM.

Most places online only have copies of the last two or three versions of the CDROM, and only include the Device Driver and Voyetra demo programs.. don't install the demo programs.. they can confuse a new comer as to what is and is not part of the essential Device Drivers and Applications that support the TB SC.

All that said..

I've never had a problem installing the TB SC card under WinXP with Service Pack 2 Professional or Home editions.

I have had problems with the defaults that some CDROMs set for 2 speaker or 4 speaker setups.. and plugging my headphones or speakers into the right output jacks. If you plug them into a jack that is not being used while in 2 speaker mode (for example) you won't get any sound.

Fair warning too.. if you decide to try Vista-32, most of the drivers will install.. but the Gameport/Midi port of the card can never be made to work.. because Vista (removed) the subsystem that enabled Gameports/Midiports and forced them to only exist on USB ports. Some people have hacked stuff back into Vista-32 to allow support.. because Vista-32 was that "malleable" but its a hard thing to redo each time you reinstall.. and for little gain. WinXP is the right operating system for this card.. nothing later. Same goes for Win7.. and forget Win10 with this card.

Driver Frustration:

When a device driver, the right one, or the wrong one, gets installed if it wasn't part of WinXP, its called an oem.inf driver and gets put into the Driver store under C:\Windows.. as a new oem.inf

These don't tend to get cleaned out by uninstalling a device and "pile up" in random order and will spring back into action when the plug and play manager starts searching for a device driver for something its detected that needs a device driver. So the same "wrong" device driver can get installed [before] the new device driver you supply gets a chance at installation.. forcing an un-plug and re-plug during the new device driver install merely reinstalls the "old, wrong" device driver [again]

So even if you uninstall a device, then trigger a hardware scan.. or move the card from slot to slot.. those "old" device drivers can stick around to haunt you and interfere.. even if you get the correct or better device driver for your hardware.

The oem.inf files include directions for not only binary device drivers, but registry settings to stuff into the registry for the device drivers.. and those can also walk over each other and confuse the correct or wrong device drivers when they boot up.. so it becomes a waste of time.

The best over all thing to do is perform a new fresh install of windows on something fast, like a cheap SSD and start anew with the TB SC device driver install.

Weeding and manually pulling out all the unknown pieces of previous attempts just isn't worth the speed, ease and convenience of slipping in a new SSD and performing a fresh install with Easy to Boot and Snappy Driver.

WinXP will run in trial mode for up to 49 days which is plenty of time to discern if there is going to be a problem, and then you can activate, or restore an activation.. or perform a fresh install of WinXP again.

You really have to get use to reinstalling WinXP because problems emerge, from fragmentation to random blue screens.. and all sorts of things from your trying one thing or another. Keeping a single version of XP running long term will involve reinstalls.

What software? TBSC is drivers, and the Windows controls it.

SP3 is just SP2 with "security" junk. MS was never great with malware, so it was quaint and ridiculous. Some other updates, but I don't recall them all. Nothing benefited video capture, and in fact more XP issues are attributed to SP3 or non-SP. SP1 works, but SP2 best.

If you can acquire an MSDN copy of XP, all that activation/WGA/etc nonsense is not a worry.

As a note, ATI MMC often shows TBSC to fail some sort of flawed internal test. Disregard.

Many thanks jwillis84 for a very insightful breakdown.
I am taking you advice and have purchased a XP Sp2 full version from ebay (sealed box!). This machine is dedicated to my capturing project only so I might as well clean it up. I will purchase/install new drive and start fresh.
If I go the Samsung EVO SSD route - do you think there will be an issue with this drive going into my PC? It's a bit older.
ASUS P4S8X

XP doesn't have TRIM for SSD, so be aware of that problem.

I just wanna close the loop on this issue - with my Windows XP SP2 still en route from ebay I decided to pop in a clean IDE drive and install my Windows XP SP3 on it. With the new drive completely clean of apps (and other junk), the TBSC installed and passed the sound check - no issues. So Windows XP SP3 seems to be fine for this card. It must have been other crap that was causing the issue because there were alot of apps on that other drive.

22west