Which company provides best audio chips for hi res

[EpicGamer835]

Which are the chipsets companies which provides the best audio chips like Sabre and some of Realtek chips are these the only one flagship chip providers or these are only one at beginner level.

 

[da na]

I'd say Creative produces some of the best audio hardware, most of their soundcards use their own chips.

[Freakwise]

Since you're asking about chip themselves ess probably has one of the best on desktop 

Outside desktop use case there's other that probably beat it but, like i said it was outside desktop use case

 

[rice guru]

Chips don't matter as much as you think it's all about implementation. If your looking for a nice dac what's your budget?

[Spuriae]

For the current state of the art, DACs is AKM, ESS, and Cirrus; TI and AD for op-amps. There are a handful of discrete designs with comparably high performance for both digital and analog.

 

Design matters a lot more than the chip selection in most cases, though. The potential of the best-measuring chips is hard to maintain for even good designers; even tiny changes like moving a circuit element a few millimeters in the wrong direction can measurably degrade performance when the chips themselves only contribute errors well under 1ppm.

 

Meanwhile motherboard makers are still making basic mistakes like using highly nonlinear devices in the signal path... it doesn't matter those products use Realtek or ESS; they'll all measure about the same when errors of that sort are happening.

[H713]

I suspect that the biggest issue motherboard makers have has more to do with layout / grounding than anything else, and that very often seems to compromise the noise floor. I've seen very talented engineers and scientists screw it up. The less experienced engineers make mistakes more often than not. In audio it tends to result in a miserable noise floor and a lot of distortion. With RF systems or high-energy systems, grounding becomes even more critical. 

 

Things are also tricky right now, since one of the best DAC chips on the market (the AK4499EQ) is NLA for probably another year.