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Turtle Beach has become widely known as a provider of very good quality PC audio solutions for almost every possible segment of the electronic music world.

Today we're taking a look at their flagship desktop entertainment positioned 3D audio product, the Montego II Quadzilla, and seeing how it stacks up in audio quality and subjective testing.

Aureal's competent Vortex 2 audio processor powers the "Quadzilla" (a cute reference to the four-speaker support of the Montego II), which is one of Sharky Extreme's favorite 3D sound generators in games like Half-Life, Quake2, etc.

Is this enough to warrant your hard-earned dollars in regards to choosing the Montego II over other similarly powered Vortex 2 cards like Diamond's MX300?

Keep reading…

Although the Quadzilla is powered by a standard Vortex 2, the way Turtle Beach has chosen to outfit the supporting gear around the chip differs from their competition.

First off, Turtle Beach opted to off-load the dual rear channel out port of the Montego II onto a second PCI card, or daughtercard, along with adding a digital S/PDIF port to the mix.

It may seem like this is a strange move compared to the solutions that both Creative's SBLive! and Diamond's MX300 products currently use, which is to include both dual channel speaker outs (for a total of four independent channels) on the primary audio card itself.

Turtle Beach likely chose this process to smartly save manufacturing costs on the Montego II, as the PCB of the main card along with its out ports matches the previous two channel Montego I part that Turtle Beach has produced for the past year and a half.