I've decided to hide an old IBM laptop near my stereo
for use as a poor man's Squeezebox. I used the "shared
folder" feature of windows to access my digital music
collection (purchased from eMusic, and stored on another
PC) wirelessly. Pretty nice -- I don't have to transfer
music to the laptop itself, which has only a small hard
drive.
I initially had an adapter cable running from the
"headphone out" on the laptop to stereo RCA cables
to the stereo. The stereo volume had to be cranked
up pretty high, and the sound quality seemed just okay.
I took the Micro II card out of the packaging, plugged
it into a USB port, and that was that. The laptop,
running Windows 2000, recognized it immediately and
I simply plugged my adapter cable into the Micro II.
I haven't run any careful tests to compare the sound
of the Micro II to the sound chip on the laptop, but
subjectively the sound with the Micro II was a lot
clearer, and I could set my stereo volume as I would
normally when using the CD player. My wife said she
could hear a big improvement in the sound.
In short: totally simple to set up, works with my
Windows 2000 laptop, and seems to sound much better
than the laptop headphone output. Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro II USB Analog & Digital Audio Adapter
The built-in sound on my Acer netbook running Ubuntu 10.04 is poor. Headphones on this adapter sound great, but the real joy comes from using an optical "cable" to connect up to my stereo -- the sound is wonderful.
This adapter is recognized as soon as I plug it in, although I do occasionally have to manually select it over the onboard audio output.
I bought this to replace an old Griffin iMic that I had connected to a Mac that I use as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). The HTPC is connected to a Sony HTCT100 Sound Bar / Sub Woofer. The Micro II sounds a little better, but for some reason I can now no longer adjust the volume using the Macs volume control, perhaps this is a limitation of the optical output ?
The main reason for buying this was to get 5.1 and DTS so that DVD's would sound better. Unfortunately Turtle Beach do not support these features on the Mac, and do not provide any custom drivers. If I had know this at the time of ordering I probably would have gone with a Behringer U Control UCA202 USB Audio Interface which sounds great, and also has an optical out.
I am very happy to see that this usb audio card worked without any trouble or driver installs under Ubuntu 10.04. The "no driver required" is indeed true from what I have seen.
I bought this because the shielding of the motherboard's audio output was terrible in my computer. The main use-case is listening to music via headphones, and for this it worked great! The volume levels coming out were actually shocking at first, but after adjusting the sound volume in Pulse Audio (global and device specific) everything sounds as it should.
I purchased this product solely for the optical port and surround sound option with the driver install.
The site says the driver is compatible with my OS but not matter what I tried I got at least 3-4 errors when installing it. Their tech support took something like 5-7 days to email me back(no phone number) and about a day per email. Over another 5-7 days we still hadn't figured anything out.
After a few days of tinkering and turning off a few security things I managed to get it to 'sort of' work. Basically I had to install in safe mode and ignore ALL the errors. After letting Microsoft take over the device I had the option to pick a Turtle Beach driver. However... if I tried to use the software to set up the device it immediately stopped working with no way to fix it short of trying a new USB slot. I can get the surround light to light up when I play movies that support it and that is it. So far the games I've tried (Bioshock 2, Crysis, etc) don't actually get the light to light up.
The hardware itself seems ok, just plug and go. Your computer will know what it is. The driver that gives it the surround sound option is the problem. Lack of support didn't help either.
Honestly I would avoid this if you are looking for an easy 'plug n play' workaround for not having the optical port.
This product works perfectly for me so far.
I have only had it for about a week, so I can't comment on the durability.
I haven't had any problems with it, so I can't comment on Turtle Beach's customer service.
I use this device to send multi-channel, compressed audio (Dolby Digital, DTS) from my laptop to my home theater receiver.
I send the video stream via HDMI to my TV. My receiver is just old enough that it doesn't have any HDMI inputs; only digital coax and Toslink.
My TV will pass the audio to my receiver via Toslink (which is awesome for OTA broadcasts w/ multi-channel audio), but restricts the stream to 2-channel stereo.
So, using HDMI from my laptop, I'd never be able to watch a Blu-Ray disc in anything more than stereo .
That's no good. I'd rather watch a DVD in 5.1 or 6.1 than a Blu-Ray in stereo.
This Micro II solved the problem.
It sends any audio format found on today's DVDs, including DTS-ES (6.1).
And the picture and sound were perfectly matched, despite passing over separate outputs.
I also like that this thing is sleek and minimal in it's design. It takes up practically no space, requires no additional power source, and will fit easily in your laptop bag when you travel (although you probably won't use this much while traveling).
Plus, the fact that it includes the mini-Toslink adapter is awesome (what a pain it would be to have to buy one more little thing just to make it work).
And the connection is very sturdy; it won't pull out inadvertently.
The only annoying thing, to me, was that there was no way to select this device as the default output until I had installed the drivers from TB.
Yes, they are clear upfront that you'll need the drivers to use the multi-channel output feature, but I thought the thing would at least show up in my device list.
Anyway, not a huge deal. Just go directly to the TB site and get the drivers.
Oh, and to those reviewers who are Mac users, why would you even buy this?
Unless your Mac is pretty old, it probably has a dual-use jack that functions as a headphone and Toslink output.
Just get a mini-Toslink adapter, which costs about five bucks (or less). You shouldn't need any other device to send digital audio via Toslink. - Toslink - Digital Audio - Usb Sound Card - Usb Audio Interface'
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