What is wrong with op-amps?

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#861
I would also add that I am in my 60's, have hearing loss, and mild tinnitus. For somebody young, with good hearing (or consider a few with some of the best hearing) and a good playback system, the differences I can barely make out stand out as quite obvious to some of them. Humans as a species are incapable of hearing this stuff? I don't think so.
 
#862
Kindhornman said:
Max,
I know you understand that different cables can give different measured impedance, inductance and capacitance, so why is it so hard to figure out why your could hear differences in playback? Now if you said you were using two identical cable types and the sound was different I would question your conclusion, but you just told us a real measurable component that can be quantitized.
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Digital signals though going down the cable, so post #736 applies....🙂
 
#863
morinix said:
I'm not talking about the lowest noise power supply possible. Just to follow the high slew rate philosophy the power supply must have current ready at high speed to allow an op amp able to use it's slew rate spec. How is this done? Lets look backwards from the power supply pin of the op amp. First the best film bypass cap(s) you can muster as close to the opamp power pin as possible. 2nd a current source pulling 2x (min) the idle current of the op amp positioned so that it pulls the current past the pin of the op amp from the pass element VR source. 3rd a pass element that is vastly overrated for the amount of idle current it has to deliver.

This matters little though with the op amp models you guys are bandying about. Those "this is good enough for the audio guys" semiconductor EE's have fed you a load of bull sh**. Go read between the lines of the likes of Pease on attitudes about audio and understand that this is pervasive and deeply embedded in the psyche of the guys that make the decisions on what op amp products to label "audio" and feed to everyone.

I'd like to thank Jim Williams of Audio Upgrades for making me see the light.
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The whole power delivery system takes care of this including decoupling and reservoir capacitors...
 
#865
Markw4 said:
Not to me. Two problems here: (1) when mixing and recording, distortion sources like this accumulate with every process a signal goes through. It gets more and more ugly, until is sounds like really bad digital. I can't listen to that. I bought one CD of a band I like and had to throw it away because I could only listen to a few seconds of each track before being grossed out at the brittle, harsh, ugly sound of it.
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Have you considered that the cd may have been very badly mastered and dynamically overcompressed as has been the fashion for way too long now?

The way you describe the sound as 'brittle, harsh, ugly' is exactly what I would expect to hear from over-compression and has nothing to do with digital.
In fact the worst offenders in the mixing/mastering industry get exactly that sound using lots of vintage tube and ss compressors.
 
#867
What was what......

To put you all out of your misery 😀

scott wurcer said:
I listened through twice and only the Blodwin had something that bothered me but I'm not sure without further listening. The other 4 sounded identical to me.
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First out of the traps to attribute anything to one of the files... thanks for taking the lead.

Guess which you picked 😉

Jay said:
Have you ever had specific feeling about TL072 before?

Unfortunately there's no voting. If there were one, like I said yesterday, the 4562 would be the winner...
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Your thinking Blodywn could be the TL072

Jay said:
Okay, I will just make a speculation here:

BLODWYN
Based on that comparison in small segment to perceive musical bend around the lyrics "In fields..." this was the runner up. Like Scott, initially I perceived something wrong with this clip. I think it's the low drive, low capability to drive difficult load such that it shows that distortion symptom. I think this is TL072.

ESMERALDA
This shows dynamics that usually belongs to 4562. But this chip is not musical. It should be one of the two "high-end" chips (4562/OP275) but OP275 has JFET input so I think OP275 fits better with the other high-end file. I think this is 4562.

ETHEL
With blodwyn this is one of the most distorted sound. I tried to listen the sound of brush in order to find which one is 4558, because in my opinion, cheap low slew rate opamp will not be able to produce HF/brush well. I think this is 4558.

GLADYS
This is the most balanced. Perfect, hard to find anything wrong. This is the strength of 5532, but unfortunately I can't find the weakness usually associated with 5532. So I predict that this could be the chip originally used for this circuit. So I checked Mooly's thread and indeed the original Douglass Self preamp uses 5532. I think this is 5532.

MABEL
This was the winner regarding the musical bend at lyrics "In fields...". Detail and clear. But as a whole I found this fatiguing, like usually found in 4562. But that musical bend matches closely with JFET input opamp, even tho OP275 is I think a mixed between JFET and BJT. I think this is OP275.
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You are thinking it could be the TL072.

Esmerelda is the 4562 as you suspected.

scott wurcer said:
No.1 was worse and the others sounded the same. No winner here.
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What actually caught your ears with this one Scott ? Anything in particular.

tonitonitoni said:
esmeralda sounds best(little bit) , others sound same to me.

used ,foobar v1.3.12 with wasapi ,pcm2706 dac feeding akg k240 mk2

btw what is that background noise??
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Another vote for the 4562 (Esmerelda).

Interesting comments... and it was all very much uncharted territory using a tone control twice over. Was the low impedance a contributing factor ? I don't know the answer to that one.

What still surprises me is just how good (in this test) the 4558 appeared to be.

Code: 
[B]File name Blodywn    = TI4558
File name Esmerelda  = LM4562
File name Ethel      = TL072
File name Gladys     = OP275
File name Mabel      = NE5532
[/B]
 
#869
Markw4 said:
Not to me. Two problems here: (1) when mixing and recording, distortion sources like this accumulate with every process a signal goes through. It gets more and more ugly, until is sounds like really bad digital. I can't listen to that. I bought one CD of a band I like and had to throw it away because I could only listen to a few seconds of each track before being grossed out at the brittle, harsh, ugly sound of it.
(2) The debates here keeps switching between 2 standards without anybody taking note of what is going on. People have been ridiculed and called crazy for claiming to hear something that can't possibly be there. Now, when we see there is something there, we forget about all the bad, rude, insulting behavior, and dismiss those things by saying, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter for most purposes, so I was right all along anyway." You know who you are.
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I don't think that's what people are saying.

What I don't get is this:-

'opamps can never be better than discrete'
'only JFET's give a good sound'
'opamps sound clouded'
'the treble in opamps is always harsh and fatiguing
'opamps distort more than discrete'
'opamps are not as good, but we don't yet know how to measure that'

I'll leave the tube vs solid state stuff out for now.

Mooly has conducted a sort of DBT and guess what:- People are STRUGGLING to clearly differentiate between an older opamp and a modern high performance opamp even after mashing the signal up in a tone control and then re-flattening it again.

Sorry, I don't buy that if the signal passes through multiple opamp stages as in a recording process, you end up with 'brittle', 'digital' sound. Most mixing desks have multiple opamp stages. And if you are recording directly from a mic to digital via a ADC and then mixing down, you still have opamps in the signal chain. They are hard to to avoid. If you have a bad recording, its because it was engineered like that - not the fault of an opamp. I have bought some truly terrible CD's - I pitched them as well. If the producers of Dianna Krall, Yo Yo Ma, numerous other jazz and classical recordings can get it right there is no excuse for anyone to produce sonically inferior recordings - zero excuse!.

The correct conclusion from this exercise is that :-

1. claims that there are night and day differences between different opamps in well engineered gain stages are nonsense
2. even quite basic, older design opamps have superb performance in the main for line level stages
3. very careful listening is required to discern minute differences in the overall sound
4. claims that people can attribute a specific opamp type number to a specific sound are nonsense and based on pure guesswork

I would like to add a 5th, but we will need some test for me to be able to claim it

5. blanket claims that opamps are wholly inferior to discrete designs are nonsense

🙂
 
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#871
Max Headroom said:
Not so fast, there are reasons like disc pit/land quality for causing bad sounding cd copies.

Dan.
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Are we talking cds or copies of cds?

After a few hundred I've never had a bad sounding cd copy as in sounding worse than the original cd.
Had a few which didn't work but they were completely rejected by the player with zero sound output.

Unfortunately I've heard a lot of over-compression making cd masters sound worse than the vinyl versions.
 
#874
Charles Darwin said:
Have you considered that the cd may have been very badly mastered and dynamically overcompressed as has been the fashion for way too long now?

The way you describe the sound as 'brittle, harsh, ugly' is exactly what I would expect to hear from over-compression and has nothing to do with digital.
In fact the worst offenders in the mixing/mastering industry get exactly that sound using lots of vintage tube and ss compressors.
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Yes, I did consider that. I am very familiar with how to get different sounds or types of distortion at different stages of production, and using different types of processing equipment and algorithms. This particular CD sounded like near everything was done wrong. Bad ADCs, bad digital mixing and plugins, bad mastering. Not bad analog, bad digital.
 
#876
So to sum this thread up...
There is nothing wrong with op-amps, but there is something wrong with a lot of audiophile myths and beliefs....
we have discussed op-amps, digital, ferrites etc. etc. and other than anecdotal evidence and strong beliefs there has been no proof anywhere that they are bad for sound...
Though we have passed through the looking glass again with the "bitwise identical digital files store different information, where's my Nobel prize territory".
Oh and I do believe a couple of "system not up to it" remarks and a wife not quite in the kitchen...
🙂
 
#877
Mrcloc said:
Well, in my circuits, I design the circuit specifically for the op amp I'm going to use, and in these circuits, changing out the op amps makes a night and day difference.

(Expected response to come; let the debate continue)
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I doubt they are night and day and if so provide plots and screen shots showing the differences... I mentioned in an earlier post that I have seen problems when op-amps were changed, but the differences were NOT night and day by a long way. but where their. If the differences are what you perceive by listening then you need to back the data up with DBT and measurements, otherwise we have discussed all this, in the last million or so pages of this thread.
 
#880
marce said:
I doubt they are night and day and if so provide plots and screen shots showing the differences... I mentioned in an earlier post that I have seen problems when op-amps were changed, but the differences were NOT night and day by a long way. but where their. If the differences are what you perceive by listening then you need to back the data up with DBT and measurements, otherwise we have discussed all this, in the last million or so pages of this thread.
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It's just a predicted response I'm expecting... 🙂
 
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