Are you certain that the Turtle Beach Malibu Surround 64 has a Kurzweil synthesizer? It seems that there is not much information available about the TB Malibu Surround 64, but I found this text in the knowledge base on the TB website:

"The Malibu Surround 64 is the latest ISA soundcard designed by Turtle Beach. It incorporates a software synthesizer (the Wavestream synth), SRS Surround decoding, and surprisingly clean audio quality for such an inexpensive soundcard."

That would suggest that it does not use a Kurzweil synth, or at least not a hardware implementation.

I own the Turtle Beach Multisound Pinnacle Project Studio, which basically consists of the TB Pinnacle soundcard and the TB Kurzweil HOMAC daughterboard. The TB Pinnacle is identical to the TB Fiji, but it expands it by incorporating yet another Kurzweil synth (Kurzweil MA-1) and an EIDE connector on-board. The main Kurzweil MA-1 synth sounds fairly good, allows up to 48MB of sample RAM and has individual reverb and chorus settings for each MIDI channel. I was not so impressed with the HOMAC though. It didn't sound very balanced and the effects were pretty bad. Furthermore, it only allows a global effects setting, so you can't adjust the reverb and chorus for each individual instrument.

As for the DOS support, I find the TB Pro Series all quite lacking in this department. It is clear that these cards were aimed at musicians, rather than gamers. Therefore, they have very limited DOS support. I had a quick look in the manual of the TB Pinnacle, but nothing states that you can use either the on-board or the daughterboard synth in a real DOS environment. They only explain how to use the EIDE connector and the joystick port in real DOS. Therefore, the daughterboard on the Fiji will probably not work in real DOS.

Hope that answers your questions. 😀

Edit: Another page in their knowledge base has this to say about the Malibu Surround 64:

"* Legendary Kurzweil(R) hardware wavetable synthesis with 4 MB of instrument samples compressed to 2 MB."

So they either failed to mention on the first page that, in addition to the software synth, it also has a hardware synth, or the second page is incorrect. I'm assuming that the second page is correct though, because it lists all the specifications of the card. Also, from the rather vague pictures on the web, it looks like it might use the same chips as the HOMAC. Furthermore, the HOMAC also has 4MB of samples compressed to 2MB. Would you mind taking a picture of the TB Malibu Surround 64 and upload it to your website? I'd like to see a proper picture of it. 😀

Wikipedia says: Malibu Surround 64 - 4MB 64-Voice ISA bus Wavetable Sound Card introduced 1997. Uses Kurzweil hardware synthesis 64 voices including 32 hardware voices and 32 software voices, 4MB instrument samples compressed to 2MB ROM. Crystal CS4237B PnP chipset.

In the photo I attached one can clearly see the Rockwell (Kurzweil) chips, both the ROM and the synthesizer. This would lead me to believe that this card has a Kurzweil hardware wavetable synthesizer.
And yes, DOS support for Turtle Beach cards was severely lacking, but these card where never intended to be used in such a way.

Thank you for the picture. Both the Rockwell chip and the ROM chip marked "GMROM2MB" are exactly the same as the ones used by the Kurzweil HOMAC. However, the HOMAC has another Rockwell chip and a RAM chip in addition. It appears that they omitted those chips from the Malibu Surround 64, although the space and traces for them are there on the PCB. I wonder what those two chips do. Perhaps that is the effects processor which adds global reverb and chorus to the sound?

I currently do not have my Kurzweil HOMAC installed, so I can't make a recording of it at the moment. However, I think it will sound identical to the Malibu Surround 64, with perhaps a bit of reverb and chorus added to the sound.

Thank you for your observations. I agree the open spaces on the Malibu might be used for an effects processor and some RAM.

I'm happy to dig this thread out because I recently got a Turtle Beach Malibu and did some recordings from its onboard Kurzweil Synth. You can listen to them on my website:

http://www.amoretro.de/2014/01/turtle-beach-m … soundkarte.html

Enjoy 😀

Fabian