In reply to:
As for the marketing part. Yes your right marketing of course plays a role as Burr Brown is a respected name and they are easy to promote but for every large company that I have worked for, the engineers spec it, and marketing figures out how to sell it, not the other way around. They must spec it for a reason..............and last time I checked most engineers didn't give a you know what about marketing.
But it's not the engineers that make those decisions... no E/E is going to be holding court with Kunitake Ando (Sony's president) to give him a rundown of what ICs the new Sony line will contain. Some middle manager somewhere will go to a trade show, get wined, dined and 69ed by a manufacturer, a deal will be struck whereby they each scratch each other's back and salute each other's product until they get tennis elbow, and he'll come back with a disc full of the manufacturer's slick "Our Chipset Inside" graphic treatments and marketing claims and a tube full of their product.
To see the impact of marketing hype - see
Betamax vs VHS,
Bose vs Everyone,
Monster vs Belkin.
Again, I insist the bigger fight here is manufacturers touting their chips as being the most accurate - hey, guys... why not make it a moot point, flip off the RIAA's concerns about perfect copies and give us the best possible connection between players and receivers in a digital signal? TOSlink, SPDIF - I don't care, I'm pretty easy.
Bren R.
