Turtle Beach MultiSound
The MultiSound was launched in 1992, and was primarily targeted at the professional musician market with its Proteus 1/XR synthesizer and Motorola 56001 DSP. When first released the card was simply called "MultiSound". When Turtle Beach launched their second generation of cards (Tahiti, Rio, and Monterey) a few years later, they rebranded this first-gen the "MultiSound Classic".
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Released | 1992 |
| Bus | 16-bit ISA | |
| Synthesizer | E-Mu Proteus 1/XR | |
| Audio Codec | Motorola 56001 | |
| Standards | General MIDI | |
| Ports | Mono Mic In, Stereo Line Out, Stereo Speaker Out, MIDI port | |
| Wavetable | Onboard with 4 MB ROM | |
| CD-ROM | None | |
| FCC ID# | JMN-TBS-MSND-PC00 | |
| Price | At launch: $995 (card only), $1,795 (MPC upgrade kit with SCSI controller and internal Toshiba CD-ROM drive), $1,895 (same but external CD-ROM drive) Nov 1993: $499 (card only) |
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| See Also |
The MultiSound 16-bit sound card won nearly every major editorial award in its category – PC Magazine Editor’s Choice, Windows® 100, InfoWorld Recommended Product, PC Computing Top 200, Windows User Best of Breed and Best Buy, Electronic Musician’s Editor’s Choice, and others. Rich Heimlich said "Every magazine called this the best business audio card on the market year-in and year-out. The only problem is, there's no such thing as a "business audio" market and never was. Now if only PC Magazine would figure that out and stop reviewing things from that perspective.". He scored the card 10 out of 10 for digital quality and 9.5 out of 10 for music quality.
The first generation MultiSound series used a Motorola 56001 DSP (Digital Signal Processor) chip clocked at 40 MHz and able to process 10.5 million instructions per second (10.5 MIPS). It supported 8- or 16-bit recording at up to 44.1 kHz stereo sampling rates.
The Proteus 1/XR synthesizer from E-mu was a close relative of the original WaveBlaster from Creative Labs, both of which appear to be similar to E-mu's "SoundEngine". The onboard sample ROM had 384 sound presets using 126 instruments. It could output up to 32 simultaneous voices.
Verdict: The Multisound series, whilst having some DOS compatibility are really only useful as MIDI cards (they were never designed to be used with games, DOS or to replace an Ad Lib or Sound Blaster) - The DAC cannot be set to work on an I/O range that works with Sound Blaster. The card comes with an onboard ROM bank for wavetable synth output, but you cannot change the card to use a wavetable daughterboard from DOS, so you are stuck with the onboard synth for DOS use. For Windows, it is a more usable card with excellent audio quality for MIDI output. The card comes with two memory slots to allow you to load your own samples into RAM.
General MIDI audio quality is very good. (its apparent signal-to-noise ratio is -82.4 dB).
Board Revisions
Just one board revision is known: 02.
Competition
There really wasn't much in the way of competition for the MultiSound at the time of launch.
In the Media
Setting it Up
I don't have any information on configuring the MultiSound.
Downloads
Operation Manual Get in touch if you can provide this! |
Original Driver Disk Get in touch if you can provide this! |
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More Pictures
