Sound-Card Reviews

I was looking for a way to transmit digital music from cable TV to my stereo in the family room about 40ft away. Running wires would be very difficult, so this product looked like the ideal solution. Set-up was fairly straightforward. The location of the transmitter/receiver is somewhat sensitive, but once everything is in place and the antennas adjusted for clear reception I kept getting clicks as if the music was coming off a dirty vinyl record. Totally unacceptable for listening.

Suspecting my Panasonic 2.4 GHz cordless phones at the opposite end of the house, I proceeded to unplug them. The clicks went away and I received a very nice clear channel of music. Unfortunately, I can not unplug my phones, so I will have to return this product. I called J&R Music and promptly got return authorization. Too bad, I'm still looking! Has anyone found something that works?

I'm now exprimenting with a 8oo MHz system, but I'm fighting clicks from my 800 MHz cordless phones. If I'm really careful I can position the receiver so that the clicks are tuned out. I'm finding that you have to be really careful when mixing wireless gadgets together.

Low expectations key to avoiding disappointement. At least in an appartment building where the neighbors employ a variety of electronic devices the sound quality was poor, the songs sounded like they were coming from a dusty sratched up record spinning on a turntable. Changing channels (there are four) didn't help. Oh, and there were some minor problems too: couldn't get the remote to work, one cable was missing from the package while another came with a duplicate, only two batteries were included instead of four. Had to return the product. Maybe someone else with more patience and better luck will be able to get satisfactory performance out of this thing.

A bit of experimentation with the placement of the transmit and receive devices yields a good signal and decent sound quality.

I have avoided 2.4 gigahertz phones to reduce competition with my 802.11b wireless lan equipment and adding the soundlink didn't cause any problems.

This product is superior in every way to the US Robotics 900 megahertz product that I tried out first.

Neither device is true "HiFi" quality, but for music originating from a PC expectations need to be realistic and the Sonic Link is wholly acceptable.

I tried for 2 evenings to install this device in my son's Win95 system without success. The instruction sheet made it look fairly straightforward until I actually tried to install the unit. The discovery process seemed to flow normally, but the device never worked. The control panel showed that indeed the sounds were enabled and even looked as though they were working but no sound came out. I tried the installation procedure many times with no success. There was NO manual included with this device and no instructions on how to configure the jumpers on the board. The Win98 instruction said to avoid the discovery as a "Crystal" device, but that is exactly how 95 discovered it. I could never seem to get the system to use any other driver other than the "Crystal" one. I also looked for an 800 number for support and found none (perhaps I just missed it somewhere in the fine print). After 2 days of frustration I decided to try and install a Sound Blaster 16 card from another system. I was able to install the Sound Blaster in about 10 minutes with no problems. Based on my experience with trying to install this device, the poor documentation, the lack of support and the absence of a setup utility, I would not recommend the purchase of this product.

I purchased this sound card because I wanted to use the Audio Surgeon software which was listed on the box and on their website. After I installed the software I discovered that it is not AudioSurgeon, but it is AudioSurgeon LE. When you click on a feature it says something like "This feature does not work in this version, you must purchase AudioSurgeon for this feature." I wrote to tech support and their response was "AudioSurgeon LE comes bundled free with the Riviera sound card." They also changed the website to say "AudioSurgeon LE"

I called Voyetra which seems to own Turtle Beach and they said "we can name the software anything we want. You can bring the sound card back to the store and if you don't want to do that you can get a lawyer."

Don't expect tech support, or customer service with this product.