Thread: Hardware Review: Turtle Beach Roadie

Originally Posted by PootsworthIII

Cons:

-The unit seems to be USB bandwidth hungry. I had random popping and clicking, like rice krispies in my music. After some reading, I figured out it was because the unit was starved for bandwidth. I added a PCI USB card and dedicated it the Roadie, problem solved. (Note: I switched motherboards at the same time I switched soundcards. The new motherboard could have USB bus management issues. )

hey PootsworthIII,

I'm having the same issue. I emailed turtle beach and they claim this wouldn't fix the issue. My sound is playing fine, but i have video latency issues obviously when the sound card is working. I'm almost 100% it is the sound card creating this, since on my old sould card I had no issues with video. You think taking the route of adding anothe cardbus will solve my problem.

I had bass working fine for a couple hours and then opened up the equalizer and now it's gone. 2 channel mode and 4 channel. Does anyone know if an E46 is powering the sub off front or rear channels?

Originally Posted by kelmk

I had bass working fine for a couple hours and then opened up the equalizer and now it's gone. 2 channel mode and 4 channel. Does anyone know if an E46 is powering the sub off front or rear channels?

I have the issue on occasion, a reboot or a hibernate cycle seems to fix it.

Did anyone ever figure this out? I have 4.1 channel sound when playing music through freeice or wmp but anything else is front channel only. I can turn on surround mode and get some sound to the rear speakers but none of the surround modes are any good. There is no simple copy front to rear mode, only padded cell, concert hall, sewer pipe, etc garbage. Why would I want to pretend I was in a sewer pipe?

Originally Posted by jeffw

Actually, I'm not seeing this. In 4 speaker mode, the rear speakers have no bass, just the fronts. In 5.1 and 7.1 modes, no speakers have bass, except the sub channel. The speaker equalizer makes it look like you can control this crossover for each speaker, but boosting the bass on the rear channels has no effect. This may be OK for a car environment, but I would prefer getting full frequency response from each speaker.

Also, WAV's (windows sounds) and synthesized voice play on the front channels only. This might be a nice feature, actually, but it would be nice to have control.

Also, WinAmp 2.9.5 (the recommended one for RR) only plays music out the front channels, when in 4 speaker mode. Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the latest version of WinAmp make use of all 4 channels, but without bass to the rear.

This is in contrast to my ALC650 AC97 onboard sound which does play full range out of each speaker. However, the onboard sound system has weak mic inbput. A powered mic would be needed. And this leads me to the reason why I'm still keeping the roadie... it has a +20db booster for the mic input, and passive mics work great.

I'm also keeping it for the S/PDIF input for use with the Sirius tuner.

Note the Roadie doesn't come with any kind of AC3 encoding software, so the S/PDIF output is only 2-channel.

vista or windows XP ? I couldnt get Vista to work with it, same symptoms. XP worked fine first time. DirectSound changed / disappeared with Vista.

XP. Streaming radio like pandora or last.fm do not output to the rear channels at all unless I set a surround mode. All it needs is a surround mode that just mirrors the front channels but that doesn't seem to exist. Maybe I am missing a setting somewhere. The Audio Advantage control panel is not the best.

Is there a bass redirection feature, that sends all bass to the LFE output below a certain frequency? Is this frequency adjustable? I love the Creative X-Fi controls for this (on my PCI card controls). Is there any fader adjustment (front to rears)?

I'm considering getting a usb sound card for my new mini ITX setup.

I tried the Turtle Beach advantage SRM, the first day i tried it, i sent it back. It was not as good sound quality as the Live 24bit. Also the SRM has no virtual surround, so anything on the line in port only played through the front speakers, were as the Live will play it through all speakers. The SB Live has issues also with it not working after hibernation and not working in 24 bit mode when doing certain things. In my case, when I ran Centrafuse the soundcard would go to 16 bit mode and give me a warning. I have finally decided to get a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer along with the 7.1 surround cables. If you can go PCI with the soundcard, then do it.

Despite some of the above comments, I enjoyed my Turtle Beach Roadie. I'm getting rid of my car PC, and have mine for sale if anyone's interested. Make an offer.