Montego II Plus is the latest audio card in the Montego series and is based around the Areal Vortex processor, which provides positional A3D sound.

In addition to the main board is a digital I/O card which has both optical and coaxial RCA S/PDIF digital connections. This extra backplate provides digital inputs and outputs allowing you to record and playback pure signals, and connect your PC with digital home theatre speakers, Minidisc recorders and DAT machines. Montego II Plus has 18-bit convertors for crystal clear recording and playback at up to 48KHz sample rate. It also boasts 320-voice PCI wavetable synthesis and 4Mb on-board memory for storing the instrument sample set.

The card should have installed into our test machine with no problems because it is plug and play, but we couldn't get it to work because of some issues with the drivers for the new Intel 820i chipset.

Installation went smooothly when we inserted the card into a PC with an older Intel 440BX chipset. (Don't forget that the extra digital I/O backplate requires and extra slot on the rear of your PC, even though it does not plug into a PCI or ISA slot.)

The drivers and software were installed from the CD. A good range of software is bundled including Voyetra AudioStation 32 for CD, Wav and Midi playback; Audioview for DigitalAudio extraction and Midi Orchestra Plus for Midi production.

We thought that the software bundled with the Creative Soundblaster Live! Platinum is more comprehensive and made use of the digital connectors, whereas there is no Minidisc software in this bundle, for example. Also, the only cable supplied is an internal CD audio cable. No digital cables, RCA or optical, were included as part of the package.