There are some other audio codec manufacturers, but codecs from them are rarely seen on motherboards. A good example is Cirrus Logic, a company that manufactures very high-end codecs used mainly by home theater receivers. One of their codecs, CS4382, was used on a few very high-end motherboards from MSI (K8N Diamond Plus and K9N Diamond Plus, for example), providing a state-of-the-art audio quality for these products (signal-to-noise ratio of 114 dB, for example). In the past they also provided low-end audio codecs and controllers using the brand “Crystal”. Cirrus Logic and Crystal products start with the letters “CS” and you can see their current list of codecs by clicking here.

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Figure 5: Cirrus Logic CS4382 codec and Creative Labs controller on a MSI K9N Diamond Plus motherboard.

Another popular controller/codec manufacturer from the past was ESS, which had chips starting with the letters “ES”.