Quote: Originally posted by Colin_S on 27 January 2005
DAC = Digital Audio Convertor it is what makes the unit sound good or not.
burr brown are a well respected manufactuer of DACs of a high quality, not as good as Crystal tho.
That unit has one regulated 1 bit burr brown DAC which is good by todays standards, mine has 4 x 24 bit Crystal DACs. Most units on the market today have 1 (non burr brown) 1 bit DAC. New Sony HU have crap quality DACs which is why anyone that knows anything about Car audio hates Sony.
Burr brown *were* a well respected manufacturer of DACs, but then TI bought them and it all went a bit pear shaped! We designed an instrument with BB dacs in it, but we found loads of issues with them, we had to speak to the designer at TI who confirmed some of these, right pita!
Im sure they still sound nice in the audio domain though.
<tech-geek>
Most DACs work using precision resister ladders to generate differing currents depending on which bits are set, because of this arrangement the resistors have to be very accurate, otherwise the current wont be linear and therefore your output wont be linear.
A 1 BIT dac (sigma delta) is theoretically better (more accurate) than a 16, 24 or another other number you care to imagine, because there is no need for matched resistors. The 1 bit dac uses a digtal pulse train which is fed into a filter to produce the final output.
</tech-geek>
