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In Reply to: RE: burson audio op amps posted by hawkmoon on December 23, 2016 at 07:36:34
Well, that's one way to ensure you spend A LOT more money. As far as improving the sound, I don't know if that will be accomplished. These discrete opamp people do not publish any specs. All you have to go on is ad copy and testimonials, which are always suspect. I know specs don't tell the whole story, either, but I don't understand how one can throw money around in such a gamble. Other than expense, what is it, exactly, that makes a discrete opamp sound better? I am NOT an objectivist, but I am a realist.
Anyone care to discuss discrete opamps and how they improve the sound in a particular application?
Peace,
Tom E
berate is 8 and benign is 9
Follow Ups:
As far as I'm concerned, I've had sensible jumps in sound quality from the smallest tweaks and improvements (for exemple, replacing a 1" jumper in my speakers passive crossover with a piece of solid copper resulted in a cleaner, smoother, and more open high range, but it took me 6 years before I thought of doing it)
...I guess it has become a fact that everything the signal has to go trough gives a color to the sound, substracts, detracts, distorts... even the material your preamp's PCB is made of, the quality of the CINCH sockets, not the mention the uber-obvious cables.
I don't know for sure, but to me it seems logical that a discrete opamp should sound better because of its construction. That's how I see things: take the same schematic, the same circuit - the "operation amplifier", you either squeeze everything in a chip the size of a flea, or you give the same circuit space to breathe, proper tracks, proper transistors. I'm no engineer, but as an audiophile, it seems logical that the discrete version would sound better.
I don't see why I would spend generous (if not crazy) amounts of cash on cables and have my signal go trough this bottleneck.
70$ might be steep compared to 3$, but if you think of it differently (it's an active device made of a vertain number of smaller components) it looks more reasonable to me than a pair of nordost interconnects. I mean, I'm an audiophile on the cheap, but what in hell is 70$ (multiplied by a factor of 6 or 10 even) compared to all the rest in the audio(phile) world?
All the little bits add up, even inches of wire. And the big bits.You have the discrete/IC argument backwards. There is no reason why a discrete circuit should sound better, and many reasons why a chip can sound better. With the precision of modern manufacturing, every part of an IC can be made with better control and consistency. All the circuit paths will be shorter, sometimes by a huge factor, and have fewer soldered junctions, which is always a good thing. Thermal matching of active devices will always be more precise. There is no need for a circuit to breathe, unless it is producing heat. If opamps get more than fingertip warm, there is something wrong.
I'm not claiming that every IC will sound better than any discrete circuit, but there are reasons why they should. Unless the discrete guys know some secrets about circuit design or component performance, chances are good that a chip will sound better. I have yet to see any concrete proof that a discrete opamp performs better than an equivalent IC in any parameter. If it did, I wouldn't hesitate to spend whatever it cost to get one. I use input coupling caps that cost almost as much as my entire amplifier, so cost is not a limiting factor for me if performance justifies it. I have not seen such justification for discrete opamps, other than ad copy which claims that they sound better.
Now, if you want to discuss discrete buffers instead of discrete (or IC) opamps, that is a completely different approach, one that I would love to try. Any opamp wastes a lot of circuitry and a lot of gain for the little bit it needs to do in a crossover: present appropriate impedances to the filters. A discrete buffer is the perfect device, but nobody sells those and I'm not smart enough to make my own.
Peace,
Tom E
berate is 8 and benign is 9
Edits: 12/25/16
A pair to replace my 2134 op Amps is 140 dollars-not really big money. Though I, like you, would like to hear user experiences as well.
$140 is not a lot of money until you see that those op amps start at about $3 each.
ET
"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking till you do suck seed" - Curly Howard 1936
That's the manufacturer talking. But as consumers, we don't have to worry about building a product to a price.
And yes, if you replace all opamps in a professional mixing table for exemple, it becomes A LOT of money, but we're talking about tweaking devices with a few chips only...
I'm not worried about a few dollars if it sounds better.
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