Turtle Beach Audio Advantage: Roadie or Roadkill?
Bobby R. Beaver

Sound on laptops has long been an afterthought at best. Faster processors, better screens, and fancier cases are what make sales in the average computer stores, not the audio capabilities. To truly turn your laptop into a portable sound studio, you'll need an external sound card. Turtle Beach steps forward with the Audio Advantage Roadie, a USB sound upgrade device which gives your laptop the ins and outs most portables lack.

The Roadie comes with a proprietary USB cable, a 5.1 speaker adapter cable, a 1/8” cable for hooking up to 7.1 systems, and a couple of 1/8” optical adapters for converting a standard Toslink cable to plug into a 1/8” jack (a nice touch, since those adapters are nearly impossible to find). It also comes with a cloth bag to carry it in (another nice touch).

The photos don't do Roadie justice – it's a tiny little thing, barely large enough to contain all the ins and outs. The Roadie has combination digital/analog inputs and outputs, a headphone jack, a jack for the 5.1 speaker cable, and a stereo microphone input cable. The Roadie also has built in stereo microphones, intended for recording meetings, lectures, and ambient sounds. There's also a volume control on the side.

The software that comes with Roadie provides an equalizer, mixer, setup screen for speaker adjustments, and effects. All were easy to use after a little practice. The mixer screen allows you to adjust the input level, select the input device you wish to record, and set the playback levels of the individual inputs. It also has a level meter to set recording level.

By design, the Roadie is a USB 1.1 device. Hooking it to a USB 2.0 port won't make any improvement in the way it works. It is, essentially, a one-way street. Your computer can send signals to Roadie, or receive signals from Roadie, but not both at the same time. This means that when you are recording with the Roadie, you listen to the “dry” sound that is being merely passed from in to out by the Roadie itself. This can be a little disconcerting at times as when you raise or lower the input control, you depend wholly on the audio level meters to ensure that the level is satisfactory. With this in mind, I took Roadie for a full road trip through all its capabilities and features.

The built-in microphones picked up sounds very well. The mixer screen has a switchable boost feature to increase gain, at the expense of noise. Spectral analysis showed that the microphone frequency response isn't rolled off on the bass end like most microphone inputs are. Blessing or a curse, depending on what your needs are. I found that the Roadie was prone to hum, depending on placement, when the built-in microphones were being used.

The digital input worked flawlessly, and recorded audio sounded good. However, due to the lack of built-in digital decoding, you can't hear the digital audio as its being recorded unless your source device is hooked up to an amplifier. Roadie also does not have any built-in Dolby Digital or DTS decoder, so hooking up to a DVD player will wind up with no sound at all, unless it is set for PCM output. Roadie can only take an optical digital input. If you only have a coaxial digital output, you'll need a coax-optical adapter.

The analog input gave a less than stellar performance. With the input control set to minimum, the level meter hovered at –54 db, very poor for any audio device and more akin with what would be expected from an inexpensive cassette deck. Analog recording was infused with hiss. More annoying was the fact that the hiss was not linear in response, but instead was peaked at the treble and bass ends. The difference between recordings made via digital input and analog input were completely obvious.

But hey, you can watch DVD's in surround sound on it, right? Maybe. I was unable to perform even this basic feat on Roadie. Even though I had the speaker setting set for 5.1, and the Roadie test software worked perfectly, I could not convince my DVD player software to work in anything other than 2 speaker mode. (I tried two different players and both Dolby Digital and DTS DVD's). I like to think that I am a patient person, but after an hour, I gave up in disgust.

Finally, I tried out the included Audio Surgeon software. The web site indicates Audio Surgeon is a powerful audio editor which has the ability to remove pops from records, among other awe-inspiring feats. I was ready to give it a real challenge, only to be met with further disappointment. The version included with Roadie is a “LE” version. Roadie's booklet indicates that this means “Limited Edition.” They should have called it “ELE”, for “Extremely Limited Edition.” Because all of the functions you would need in an audio editor program have been rendered inoperative in the LE version. A very cheap move for Turtle Beach , considering Voyetra and Turtle Beach are one and the same. The least they could do is spring for a full version.

Had I actually purchased the Audio Advantage Roadie, I would be taking it back to the store for a refund. The exceptionally poor performance on analog recording alone would be enough to dissuade me from purchasing it. The lack of built-in digital to analog conversion for digital audio was another annoyance, and the inclusion of useless software was the third strike. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the Roadie. This flawed product is simply a wrong turn.