MultiSound Tahiti Soundcard

Turtle Beach MultiSound Tahiti Soundcard

ISA Interface, one of the first generation of Sound-Cards.

 

Relase Date: 1991/1992

Turtle Beach introduced their revolutionary new sound hardware called MultiSound at COMDEX/Spring '91 which took place in Atlanta, GA on the 20th to 23rd of May 1991. The card hit the market in December of 1991 with a list price of 995 USD, though it was reduced to more affordable 600 USD by December of 1992 to compete better with Creative SoundBlaster 16 (350 USD for the ASP version) and alikes. In a matter of fact, MultiSound was a real engineering masterpiece aimed at sound professionals. It combined hardware advantages of the 56K system with much lower manufacturing costs and additional features, though it supported analogue inputs and outputs only. Unlike all other sound cards for the ISA bus, it didn't utilise DMA channels because the Hurricane architecture it was built upon required only a single IRQ, an I/O port and a 32Kb window in upper memory. So, this 4-layer board 34 centimetres long was populated by a whole lot of fine silicon hardware:

 

40MHz 24-bit Motorola DSP56001 / three 8x256Kbit 70ns SRAM chips;

10MHz 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor with two 8x256Kbit 70ns SRAM chips and one 512Kbit EPROM chip;

an E-mu Proteus 1/XR synthesiser with four 8Mbit Asahi Kasei ROM chips;

two Altera EP1810 (EP1810LC-20T - 48-macrocell programmable gate arrays;

two Crystal 4328 - 18-bit DACs with 64x oversampling;

one Crystal 5336 16-bit ADC with 64x oversampling;

three Philips NE5532 -dual 9V/µs 10MHz operational amplifiers;

two Dallas 1267 - dual 256-position resistor arrays;

one Philips NE558 quad timer;

some ISA bus buffering logic.

 

For more Information about this card look at: alasir.com/software/multisound/

 

For more pictures of vintage PC-Cards and Mainboards look at Vintage Computer PC Cards and Mainboards

 

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