Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro: It’s Great, Honest
When I was last in the U.S. I picked up a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro. It’s a little USB flash drive-sized audio output interface. It has a single 3.5mm jack socket which works either as an analogue electrical output, for headphones, or as an optical digital output. Snazzy. It was pretty cheap - can’t remember exactly how much, but little enough for me to think that if it delivers better quality than I already have on my laptop, which let’s face it isn’t hard, then it was worth it.
Now, if you’re going to get one of these, there are some things I found out the hard way:
1. When you plug it in, turn the volume way down. When they say it includes a more powerful than usual headphone amplifier, they ain’t kidding. I know laptop musicians and DJs use this gizmo as their headphone out for monitoring, and it’s really up to that job. Believe me, with reasonably sensitive headphones like my Etymotic ER4-Ps, you absolutely do not want a Windows alert sound in your earholes at full blast. It hurts.
2. Don’t install their driver. I know that sounds like an odd thing to suggest, but here’s the thing. Yes, if you install the supplied “aa_micro.exe”, you can play with the daft simulated surround sound gubbins, and faff about with the EQ, but if like me you’re only interested in good quality music playback, none of that matters a fig. More to the point, there’s a real problem with the noise floor when you have the driver installed. The quiet bits in any song, whether it’s mp3, flac or even uncompressed, will sound like cack. Now, Turtle Beach try to explain the lack of sound quality away, but I’m not buying it. Even when you have your sound levels adjusted properly (see point 3 below) it still has the really annoying small-amplitude artifacts. Luckily, Windows XP has a perfectly usable driver on hand - the device when you first plug it in is recognised as a “C-Media USB Audio” device. This driver works perfectly for straight stereo playback.
3. Get your volume levels in the right range. If you’ve been used to using the bog-standard audio output on your computer with most of the levels on maximum, you really need to change them. Like I said before, the Audio Advantage is very likely much, much louder so you’ll have to turn things down - but believe it or not, there’s a knack to that. If you just turn down the master volume, you’ll get the artifacts mentioned above in the quiet parts of the music. They’re much less obvious when the driver’s not installed, but they’re still there. Instead, I do something like this - open the Sounds and Audio Devices Control Panel, and hit Advanced in the Device volume panel:
Now you’ll see the mixer controls, where you can set individual levels for the different inputs to the sound card. Your mp3 player like iTunes, WinAmp or whatever plays back through the “Wave” channel. Normally these controls are just for balancing the different inputs when they’re too different to each other, but what you’ll use them for here is to reduce the overall level coming into the final mix, so that the master volume slider can be higher. Without setting the Wave input to about 60%, the Master slider literally had to be at only a few percent before the music was at a comfortable volume for me - and that leads to the nasty artifacts. So your settings should look something like this:
Finally, the volume level in your music player app should probably be around the 50% mark:
And now I’ve done all this, what do I think of the quality? It’s nothing short of superb. It took a lot of mucking about with settings to get it right, which is why I’m posting this, but once you’ve done all that experimenting, you are rewarded with much more detail and openness than I’ve ever heard out of a built-in sound card or even fairly expensive PCI add-on cards. The little USB gizmo and my Etymotics bring out all sorts of things I’ve not noticed before. Some of that’s great - details in the nuances of voices and instruments, layers in the mix and so on, and some of it’s bad: for the first time I can honestly say that I can hear a marked difference between 128kbps CBR mp3 (stuff I ripped years ago), r3mix VBR mp3 (what I switched to - joint stereo, averages about 180kbps and is much better) and FLAC (what I’m steadily re-ripping everything to right now - keeping Seagate in business via the consequent explosion in disk space I need)
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