Good point! We all know how lead attachment, lead material, magnetism of leads etc can ruin good sound! Thanks to ICs, that's now a thing of the past! 😎
Jan
Also surface finish, ENIPIG can be used for some gold wire bonding operations, so we might as well add that to the list, also I would be concerned about the black plastic, I would presume the black is from carbon black again this should be a concern to the true believers.
Of course in many audio layouts involving op-amps the component positions etc. are far from optimal, with huge loop areas huge caps and resistors (again we all know that while some of the most sensitive measurement gear can use op-amps and SMD passives, this combination is a complete no no for serious audio designs) and crappy supply lay out with decoupling caps often on their own separated star ground connection and then wonder why things are far from optimal... 🙂
I gather from reading this thread all the way through that there is nothing wrong with op-amps, and like many things in the world of esoteric audio its all in some peoples minds (or it goes against the belief system).
Again, SY's sig line is appropriate here.
You can't bill 300 hrs development time for an opamp buffer, but you sure can for a discrete buffer - that's hard man! 😎
Jan
You can't bill 300 hrs development time for an opamp buffer, but you sure can for a discrete buffer - that's hard man! 😎
Jan
Guess one shouldn't believe everything they read?
Otoh, it could "be in some people's ears?"
Bottom line is that there is nothing particularly "wrong" with opamps, they work very nicely, they're inexpensive, handy, and very useful.
The problem comes when you peel the "onion" that is your system, attempting to optimize it, and find that when changing from one opamp to another you hear a change in the overall sound. Then you look for the usual culprits that come up when an opamp is mis-applied and not finding that one becomes concerned. Next you ask some friends to listen, and some non-audio types and see if they hear the same things or not - and since the non audio types have zero clue as to what they are seeing or hearing - when they all report to a man/woman/creature that what they hear (without being prompted) is what you hear, what do you do?
What you do is read what people say in threads like this and become extremely puzzled as to why their "beliefs" and their listening experiences are so at odds with yours and many others. And also why they want to argue their same points and beliefs endlessly without any interest in further measurements or even a discussion of possible means to design new test forms??
And you wonder why they are so insistent that everyone else must be delusional, biased or prejudiced - and can not accept the idea that just maybe, just maybe there is something more to this... which there is.
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Bear, I suggest you don't even start with moving speakers around (in order to "optimize" etc). You'll eventually ruin your floor.
I think this is the worse way of determining sound differences, to much information, clues and pressure to hear differences that are or are not there. Been to a couple of sessions like this, in one case I was the outcast as I did not agree or hear the sound difference that someone was promoting with a recent change to their gear. A few experiments later with others convinced me that sighted and clued listening sessions are very unreliable...
Indeed & the same 'actors' appear in every thread where deniability is meme.
And of course you were right, right? You didn't hear any differences in any of the 'experiments' 😀
NO! The resistive or capacitive element itself. Those are made from parts of a semiconductor inside the IC. In a discreet opamp those are traditional parts; that BTW have more to do with the finer aspects of the sound of an amplifier than most you T&M worshippers think.
Maybe you can enlighten us on how these non-linearities manifest themselves in the output since they are corrected by the massive amounts of feedback at audio frequencies?
Another theory with not a shred of evidence.
Vaccines cause autism, homeopathy cured my dog, and silicon resistors ruined my audio.
Another theory with not a shred of evidence.
Vaccines cause autism, homeopathy cured my dog, and silicon resistors ruined my audio.
Which of course reinforces the point of needing blinding (and even better, not telling the test group what's actually being tested to minimize preconceived notions).
Morinix--have any sort of info about the *actual* linearity of those dirty bits of sand? 😉 And absolute values may vary, but matching is very good due to process.
(P.S. IC capacitors are kind of everywhere. And by everywhere I really mean EVERYWHERE!)
DPH, how exactly does "linearity" correlate to "musical enjoyment"? Do you have a formula or something?
I agree that Marce's preconceived notions about the 'experiments' probably resulted in his biasing towards not hearing any difference. The only way to avoid this bias is by blinding him to the fact that he was even at a listening session but how would you suggest that this could have been achieved?
Its not a question of right, its a question of doing the proper tests and realising that sighted is flawed and skews the results.
Kirchhoff, you keep trotting that nonsense out. It doesn't become any less nonsense the more you repeat it, as you're quite wont to do.
First prove audibility THEN worry about how it has a chance to correlate to "musical enjoyment". Your horse and cart aren't even on the same continent.
First prove audibility THEN worry about how it has a chance to correlate to "musical enjoyment". Your horse and cart aren't even on the same continent.
Historically these have varied a lot, what went in old planar parts like the 5534 would be crap as discretes (resistors). Now the thin film is formulated as carefully as any discrete process, and the oxide capacitors have a superlative dielectric otherwise the DAC's and A/D's would not work.
We had a sample and hold many years ago that had a DA problem, it ended up being the bond wire going through the encapsulant.
Re: micro-dynamics. So you don't know why an op-amp with 2-3X SOTA noise and so-so distortion performance loses something on recordings meant to be played on one one-tube one-piece TT's with ceramic cartridges.
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Fair point, I should have qualified myself.
Depends on the DUT and test structure. Hard to root out some biases. 🙂 I'd disqualify myself from a tests where I'd be biased to assume a null (and my bias would potentially ruin the test). A well controlled test structures should mitigate that issue significantly (e.g. forced choices).
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