The Turtle Beach Corporation (commonly referred to as Turtle Beach) is a gaming accessory manufacturer based in San Diego, California. The company has roots dating back to the 1970s where it developed sound cards, MIDI synthesizers, and various audio software packages and network audio devices. The company began making gaming headsets in 2005. History Early history: 1975–2005 Turtle Beach has roots dating back to 1975 in Elmsford, New York, founded as "Turtle Beach Softworks" by 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. 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. In 1990, Turtle Beach began developing its second 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. CCRMA's Music Kit and DSP Tools running on Motorola 56001 DSP, initially developed for NeXTcube system, was later ported on NeXTSTEP with Turtle Beach Fiji/Pinnacle DSP cards. In December 1996, the company was sold by ICS to Voyetra Technologies in Yonkers, New York. The new combined company would eventually be known as Voyetra Turtle Beach. Voyetra was originally founded by Carmine Bonanno and Fred Romano in 1975 as Octave-Plateau, one of the original companies included in the MIDI standard, and had developed drivers and software for nearly every sound card manufacturer in the world during the early 1990s. As Voyetra Turtle Beach, the company sold millions of sound cards to Dell in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 2005–2013: rebranding as a headset manufacturer In 2005, the company released its first Ear Force gaming headset