Can someone with Vista BETA and a Santa Cruz look!

[Robbie Khan Reviews]

Does Vista have native support for the Santa Cruz in the latest CTP release?

I ask this because I cannot let my trusty Santa Cruz go, there isn't any other card that has satisfied my ears like it has and my av receiver loves it too. Turtle Beach have not had to release drivers for it since mid 2003 when the last final release came out which were and are 100% flawless in every way and since it's a discontinued product I don't think they will rework it for Vista.

Anyone have any idea whether the XP driver will work on Vista too? I heard some people using XP drivers for other hardware on the CTP build quite fine :s

[freeeekyyy]

Does Vista have native support for the Santa Cruz in the latest CTP release?

I ask this because I cannot let my trusty Santa Cruz go, there isn't any other card that has satisfied my ears like it has and my av receiver loves it too. Turtle Beach have not had to release drivers for it since mid 2003 when the last final release came out which were and are 100% flawless in every way and since it's a discontinued product I don't think they will rework it for Vista.

Anyone have any idea whether the XP driver will work on Vista too? I heard some people using XP drivers for other hardware on the CTP build quite fine :s

Does that card have any special features, like sample memory, or an audio processor? If not, it should work fine. If so, I don't know.

[+John. Subscriber¹]

If the drivers are WDM drivers then they should integrate with Vista (atm anyways)

[Robbie Khan Reviews]

They are WDM but the key part of it is the control panel that comes with it since everything on it is hardware pbased the control panels manages it all

[dahveeed3]

I don't know if you've resolved this yet but the latest Turtle Beach FAQ has. You can go look yourself but briefly:

You need both the latest 4193 driver and the last signed one, the 4161s.

You need Windows XP with the 4161s driver installed on another partition on your hard drive.

Run the 4193 setup on Vista. It will install the software but error out on the unsigned driver. Before rebooting, go to Device Manager and manually update the Santa Cruz or the Multimedia Audio Controller that is possibly question marked. Browse to the Program Files\Turtle Beach\Santa Cruz\Driver\WDM folder on the XP partition and Device Manager's wizard will install those signed 4161s drivers.

Reboot, and, they say in the FAQ it will all work properly.

I can't tell you whether it works from experience since I'm still running XP with the 4193's. Of course, you may not have your partition's set up with your other operating system partition's visible to each other. I generally don't as I prefer using Partition Magic and Boot Magic to create 2 primary partitions when I dual-boot. But if you did it the official Microsoft way, you're okay as you have 1 primary and 1 extended with a logical partition for your Vista partition and they will both "see" each other as they are both active. That is the only way the Turtle Beach recommended method will work.

I recently reinstalled my Santa Cruz as I wanted to use the hardware Midi synth for my keyboard. This way it responds to my pressing my notes in real-time instead of the delay that occurs with software synths. I work around this by adjusting WinGroove's latency slider but that also diminishes the sound quality. It's a shame the only card's today that offer this are Creative's offerings. I actually don't mind the Creative software everyone complains about, but hate the way the drivers infiltrate the system with zillions of files and processes, some of which eventually bug out and conflict with various important operations. Like DCOM, internet, firewalls, etc. Great software, crappy drivers.

M-Audio Revolution cards give the same or better sound quality but are hampered for poor (can't afford expensive software) folks who want real midi, as well as having software EAX in games.

The Santa Cruz reminds me of the days when you could have it all with one affordable purchase. Too bad it isn't up to date with newer audio technologies. The chip is just, old. Still sounds pretty good on sources like mp3's and such though.