Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro USB Sound Card

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=1068181&sku=T777-1012' target='_blank'>http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=1068181&sku=T777-1012</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Mind Blowing Sound in a Device the Size of your Thumb! The Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro is a portable USB Audio Adapter with both digital and analog outputs that incorporates a surround-sound simulator for creating an immersive listening experience on standard headphones or stereo speakers. Whether you're listening to a DVD on the road, or piping 5.1 surround sound to your Home Theater System, the Audio Advantage Micro is the perfect way to get the most out of your listening experience. Easy install and use, just plug your headphones into the Audio Advantage Micro, and plug the Micro into a USB port, and you've instantly got better sound!"</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/T777-1012b.jpg" /><br /><br />What a curious device! I've seen external USB-based sound cards before, but never anything quite like this. 8O It's amazing that they can pack an entire sound card into a small USB thumbdrive, although I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out what you'd use this for. Perhaps if you had a computer that lacked an optical audio out port and needed to connect it to digital speakers via optical? At only $29.99 USD, this is a cheap solution for getting a mobile digital audio optical solution. It's also available from <A HREF=http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1068181&Sku=T777-1012" target="_blank">TigerDirect.ca</A> for my fellow Canadians.

[jeffd]

Most notebooks, like most onboard soundcards, sound like absolute crap. Generaly they don't even have bass and treble controls. My notebook is one of them. I am also a santa cruze fan, as I have owned that sound card for a couple years now. Gameing 3d sound compatability wasn't all that, which is why my game cpu has a soundstorm rated chipset, but the quality in music has allways been top notch. If turtle beach has some how shrunk atleast the 2d quality of the santa cruze into that little thumb drive, I think it will be $29 well spent. I may also get it because for some reason, wifi pc cards on my laptop make music pop and crackle on playback, so this should solve that issue.

One problem I see is it looks like it will only work on usb2.0, which excludes my laptop, and most of the laptops that could make use of a high quality sound chips. :/

[sylvangale]

I tried out Griffin's Imic (USB 1.0) on my PC laptop and it worked wonders for sound quality output, I wouldn't be suprised if this little USB thing worked just as well.

Though one odd thing I noticed... that small digital adapter plugs directly into the analog plug could that still be a 'digital signal"?

[jeffd]

why not? when you switch over to digital output, it's not sending the same signal. Just because something uses a headphone jack dosnt mean audio is being sent over it. Its just a 3 wire connection.

[sylvangale]

That's what I was wondering. Didn't know an analog jack could double for digital.