Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • History [ ] Turtle Beach was founded in 1975 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 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 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 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.