Turtle Beach Systems - History

History

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. It 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 first 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).

Turtle Beach was then acquired by Integrated Circuit Systems, a maker of clock chips for the PC market. ICS wanted to broaden its market to include the new multimedia chips and peripherals, deciding to buy existing lines rather than build anew.

With the addition of ICS's resources, Turtle Beach offered a full line of PC peripherals, releasing 8 new products within the 18 months following the sale. The MultiSound Monterey, The Tahiti, Maui, Audio Advantage sound cards rounded out its hardware product line, with products at every price point. On the software side, the company released "Wave for Windows", a sound editing program that was ahead of its time, but also ahead of the hardware curve; "Quad", the first multitrack recording application for the PC; and several other software titles.

As often occurs with corporate acquisitions, the original founders were soon no longer with the company. Martin Goldberg was brought in to run the company and after moving its operations to San Jose, ICS sold Turtle Beach to Voyetra Technologies, Inc. in 1996.

Voyetra, founded by synthesizer pioneer Carmine Bonanno in 1975, had developed drivers and software for nearly every sound card manufacturer in the world during the early 1990s. The purchase of Turtle Beach allowed Voyetra to leverage its close ties with PC manufacturers by providing sound cards bundled with Voyetra software and drivers. After the purchase, the company changed its name to Voyetra Turtle Beach, Inc. and sold millions of sound cards to Dell Computer under the Turtle Beach brand.

In 2001, Voyetra Turtle Beach developed AudioTron, one of the first standalone Internet audio receivers. The device enjoyed tremendous success in the first year of its release, but was soon faced with tremendous competition from similar products. Turtle Beach opted out of the network audio market in 2004.

Recently, Turtle Beach has diversified its product line to include USB audio devices, video capture products and a wide variety of headphones, including the Ear Force line of multi-channel PC and gaming headphones.