Turtle Beach Systems
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| Public | |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: HEAR |
| Industry | Audio |
| Founded | 2008 in Elmsford, New York |
| Founders | Robert Hoke Roy Smith |
| Headquarters | San Diego, California, United States |
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Key people
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Ron Doornink (Chairman) Juergen Stark (CEO) |
| Products | Headsets, soundcards |
| Website | www |
Turtle Beach Corporation is an American sound card and headset manufacturer. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach, then headquartered in Valhalla, New York. In 2014, Voyetra Turtle Beach merged with Parametric Sound, retaining the Parametic Sound name until the name was changed to Turtle Beach Corporation.
Turtle Beach was founded in 1985 as "Turtle Beach Softworks" by co-founders Roy Smith and Robert Hoke. The company's first product was a graphical editing system that supported the breakthrough Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. The Mirage was the first low cost sampling device that allowed musicians to play realistic choirs, pianos, horns, and other instruments in their performances. The software, called "Vision", connected the Mirage to a PC and used the PC's screen and graphics to make the programming and editing of sounds much easier. Ensoniq decided to resell Vision through their dealer network and Turtle Beach Softworks became a profitable company.
Over the following years, the company developed a few other programs that supported Ensoniq equipment but realized that they needed to develop more generalized products. They retooled their product into "SampleVision", which initially supported the Akai S900, but was designed with an extensible framework, allowing other samplers to be supported. The SampleVision series was among the first to offer a Macintosh-like user experience on the PC (which at that time did not have Microsoft Windows to provide its GUI).
In 1988, Turtle Beach began to work on developing its first hardware product, a hard disk based audio editing system. Among the first of its kind, the product was named the "56K digital recording system" and was released in 1990. Its card, 56K-PC, was based on a Motorola 56000 DSP chip, and offered non linear playlist editing of stereo audio files. The 56K system was popular among radio stations and mastering studios because it replayed exactly the same digital stream that it recorded.
In 1990, Turtle Beach began developing its second PC sound card. This card used high quality A/D and D/A, a high quality synthesizer from eMu, and an onboard DSP chip. This product was called "MultiSound." The MultiSound product competed with more established products of the day from Advanced Gravis (now defunct), Ad Lib, Inc. (now defunct), Creative Labs, and Media Vision (now defunct). CCRMA's Music Kit and DSP Tools running on Motorola 56001 DSP, initially developed for NeXTcube system, was later ported on NeXTSTEP with Turtle Beach Fiji/Pinnacle DSP cards.
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Wikipedia