Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro II USB Analog & Digital Audio Adapter

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List Price: $24.95
Sale Price: $23.68
Today's Bonus: 5% Off

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.

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I am not sure, if I had done a bit more research, if I would have bought this. Turtle Beach has a good reputation for sound cards in my mind, which weighed into my purchase decision. Unfortunately, my experience with this device hasn't been good. I specifically bought this card in so that I could use SPDIF passthrough, which the card supports, but only if you have the driver installed. And there's the rub, the installer will work only if it can detect the device, and it doesn't do this reliably. From searching the web, I am not alone in running into this. The problem manifests as the installer continually asking for you to plug the device in, even if you have. It just fails to detect it.

I followed the instructions on the Turtle Beach site, and contacted their tech support, but they have not been very helpful so far. I also found while searching the web that I am far from alone in having problems getting the driver to install. After a lot of work, I have managed to get the driver to install, and it to works mostly, so I am going to detail the process I went through to make this work here.

First, before anything else, I am not a representing Turtle Beach, or providing any guarantees that this will work. It's possible that doing this will screw your computer up, and I am not responsible for anything you do to your computer.

So, the basic process to make this work is you manually extract the driver from the installer, and then install that. This is what I did on my Windows 7 machine:

1)Get the software called "Universal Extractor". Install it and then use it to extract the installer.

2)Use it on data1.cab file that was extracted from the installer.

3)Plug your Advantage Micro II in now. I assume that it is installing as a generic USB sound device, like mine. From the device manager, do properties on the generic sound card. Update the driver, have the process do a manual install, and select the driver from your computer. Point it at the directory that you extracted the installer to. You will get a warning that the driver cannot be verified as working with your hardware. Accept it and continue. You will likely need to reboot at this point. IMPORTANT: if you are on a 64 bit version of Vista, 7, or 8, you will need to disable signed driver enforcement. If you don't do this, your system will act like it cannot see the hardware anymore because it will not be able to load the driver.

4)At this point, you should have PCM audio coming out, just like before, but in the device manager, you will now see "Audio Advantage Micro Device".

5)I couldn't get SPDIF to work at this point even. The final step I did(and I'm iffy on this is what made it work or not) was in the extracted files directory I ran "AudioAdvantageCpl.exe". On the speakers tab(which should be the default tab), select the "Output Configuration" pane. There should be a single drop down, that says either "headphones" or "Two Speaker", with an S/PDIF option. Once I set this to S/PDIF, the pass through settings on the codecs I am using(Media Player Classic HC) seemed to take, and my receiver started getting a bitstream.

SO there you go, hope that helps some people getting this to work. Honestly, I'm debating attempting a return and getting something that works without those hoops and better vendor support.

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This product works perfectly for me so far.

I have used this for months now, with no problems.

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 (our Blu-Ray player is in our laptop, btw).

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 can pass audio to my receiver via Toslink (which is awesome for OTA broadcasts w/ multi-channel audio), but restricts the stream to 2-channel stereo when the TV input source is HDMI.

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 (using our DVD player) than a Blu-Ray disc in stereo.

This Micro II solved the problem.

It sends any audio format found on today's DVDs, including all the variations of DOLBY and DTS.

(Note: those are the only formats you'll be able to use on Blu-Ray too, even though Blu-Rays include newer, supposedly better audio formats. This is b/c the new formats can be sent only over HDMI, not digital coax or Toslink.)

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.

Oh, and to those reviewers who are Mac users, you probably don't need to buy this.

Unless your Mac is pretty old, it should have 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.

(unless, of course, you're using a Hackintosh, in which case all bets are off)

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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 from my laptop's

headphone output 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.

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I bought this because I was looking for a compact USB device with an optical digital output to connect my laptop to my sound system, and at $25, this is one of the best prices around. However, there is a single caveat that almost made this product useless to me. To use the optical output, a small adapter is plugged into the output jack, and your optical cables plugs into this adapter. However, the adapter had so much signal loss that my amplifier was unable to see the signal on the other end. I tested this with both 25' and 50' cables, so perhaps with shorter cables it works a bit better.

Fortunately, I had a mini optical cable that I was no longer using. With this cable I could plug directly into the output jack without needing the adapter, and it works perfectly. Searching amazon for "mini optical to toslink" brings up plenty of these cables, so I recommend getting one to complement this product. Here's a link to one such cable, as an example: Cables To Go 27017 Velocity Toslink-to-Optical Mini Plug Digital Cable (3 Meters)