C-Media used to be very popular, especially on low-end motherboards, and they manufactured both codecs and complete audio controllers. Audio controllers usually need an external codec to do the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions, but C-Media’s low-end audio controllers have a codec embedded inside the chip, which is why we will include them in the table below. Because of that, we included a column called “type” to let you know if the chip is just a codec requiring an external controller (e.g., connected to the south bridge chip) or if it is a complete controller with an embedded codec (usually connected to the PCI bus). Chips from C-Media use names starting with the letters “CMI,” as you can see on the example shown in Figure 3.

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Figure 3: C-Media CMI9739A codec