Are all Burr Brown DACs the same?

[FuzzyReets]

Hi folks. I'm looking at a few different receivers and they all say Burr Brown DAC. Are they all the same DAC? Is there only one Burr Brown DAC?

 

[Knucklehead90]

Burr-Brown make many different DACs. Check out their website - the Product Tree / Parametric Search on the left hand side shows a list of different products by bit count. It would appear they've made several hundreds of them over the years.

 

[lsiberian]

No, but they are all very high quality.

 

[FuzzyReets]

Interesting. I find it odd that they don't list which Burr Brown chip is in the different receivers i'm looking odd.

 

[chas_w]

Which receivers are you looking at?

 

[FuzzyReets]

Which receivers are you looking at?

Denon AVR-2310ci, Onkyos TX-SR707 and TX-NR807.

 

[Josuah]

Burr-Brown is one of those brand names that evokes "goodness" in general, like Lexus might in the auto industry. So by listing Burr-Brown, but not necessarily the specific chipset (which wouldn't help the majority of consumers looking at Denon or Onkyo), the product gets a little marketing boost.

While Burr-Brown is high quality the brand has been around for a long time and some older Burr-Brown chips are easily surpassed by other brand chips. And some would argue that there are modern chips from other brands that beat the top-of-the-line Burr-Brown chipset as well.

Anyway, the chips themselves are only a small part of the overall equation in sound quality. So knowing the particular chipset used when comparing two products isn't a good shortcut to comparing them via measurements and listening. But it can be a good starting point.

 

[chas_w]

The Denon 2310ci does not use a Burr Brown DAC, it uses an Analog Devices:

http://www.analog.com/en/audiovideo-products/audio-codecs/adau1328/products/product.html

The Onkyo 707/807 uses the BB PCM1690:

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/pcm1690.html

 

[M Code]

Burr Brown is owned by TI..
Even though TI is the largest supplier of audio DSP processors for HD AVRs, they have not been price competitive with the other DAC sources including ADI, AKM, Cirrus Logic..

Just my $0.00..

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

You are NOT going to be able to hear the difference between any of these new DACs: Burr-Brown (Denon, Yamaha, Onkyo, Integra, Marantz), Cirrus Logic (Harman Kardon), & Wolfson Microelectronics (Pioneer). Each brand has different models, but they are all excellent.