Turtle Beach MultiSound Pinnacle

The Pinnacle is the top of the range of the third-generation of MultiSound cards from Turtle Beach. In December 1996 ICS sold Turtle Beach to Voyetra, and by this stage ICS were no longer marketing the WaveFront, which again left TB without a synth chip. They turned to Kurzweil and struck a deal to use their incredible MA-1 on the 3rd-gen MultiSound Pinnacle.

	Released	1996
	Bus	16-bit ISA
	Synthesizer	Kurzweil MA-1
	Chipset	Motorola DSP56002
	Standards	General MIDI
	Ports	Mono Mic In, Stereo Line In, Stereo Line Out, Stereo Speaker Out, MIDI port
	Memory	2 MB ROM (compressed from 4 MB), with slots to support up to 48 MB RAM max
	CD-ROM	IDE
	FCC ID#	-
	Price	-
	See Also

At its heart is a Motorola 56002 DSP chip (also used by the TB Multisound Fiji), which runs at 40 MHz. The Kurzweil MA-1 is General MIDI-compatible, and contains 128 instruments, 16 channels and 32 voices, plus reverb and chorus effects for each MIDI channel built-in.

The Pinnacle also gets a WaveBlaster-compatible wavetable header which is designed to work with the Kurzweil HOMAC daughterboard (sold separately) which would then act as a second synth engine. These were also bundled together and sold as the Pinnacle Project Studio.

The two 32-bit RAM slots support FPM (Fast Page Mode) SIMM modules only, and the game/MIDI port is MPU-401 (UART) compatible.

The card also comes with an EIDE header for CD-ROM connectivity.

As you would expect from Turtle Beach, the signal-to-noise ratio on these Multisound cards is excellent, -97 dB. In playback [digital-to-analogue] tests conducted by PCAVTech, it got a Signal-to-Noise ratio of -88dB - this is considered very good.

 

Board Revisions

Two board revisions are known: D and F

 

Competition

 

In the Media

 

Setting it Up

I don't have any information on configuring the MultiSound Pinnacle.

Downloads

Operation Manual (missing) Get in touch if you can provide this!

Original Driver Disk (missing) Get in touch if you can provide this!

 

More Pictures