Try it yourself! Send me a handful of opamps; I'll sand off the markings so you won't know which is which, paint them different colors, and send them back (along with a bunch of digital pictures and a table of color vs. part number). Then you can discover which opamps sound best to YOU. It's fun, it's easy, and the results are sometimes very surprising.
I'm in California USA; it'll cost you $5.00 for postage to send me a bubble mailer envelope weighing less than 13 ounces (US First Class Mail)
I'm in California USA; it'll cost you $5.00 for postage to send me a bubble mailer envelope weighing less than 13 ounces (US First Class Mail)
I disagree. Why are you afraid of double-blind-testing? Because it will shatter your long-held beliefs in some audio mysticism? It's not infallible in the sense that some days your ears will hear differently than other days, and certainly different people hear differently. But DBT is a LOT more reliable SUBJECTIVE test than any other.
Why are you trying to turn this into an emotional issue? Fear and mysticism have nothing to do with it.
DBT asks, and answers, the wrong question during most stages of the design/development process.
Over the years I've had the pleasure of knowing quite a few top audio designers, and I can't recall a single one that used DBT as part of their process, except perhaps at the very end. Group listening sessions, sure. But not DBT.
DBT asks, and answers, the wrong question during most stages of the design/development process.
Over the years I've had the pleasure of knowing quite a few top audio designers, and I can't recall a single one that used DBT as part of their process, except perhaps at the very end. Group listening sessions, sure. But not DBT.
"Which one do I like best".
I am not dissing what you or Mark are suggesting. Blind listening tests can turn up some bizzarre outcomes. I once accidentally slipped a 4558 opamp into a balanced I/V converter listening comparison, and of the five it fared quite well. As a result, am I going to use it in that position? Absolutely not.
When doing comparative listening, I typically lose track of which is which anyway... aging's natural normalization of personal bias!
I am not dissing what you or Mark are suggesting. Blind listening tests can turn up some bizzarre outcomes. I once accidentally slipped a 4558 opamp into a balanced I/V converter listening comparison, and of the five it fared quite well. As a result, am I going to use it in that position? Absolutely not.
When doing comparative listening, I typically lose track of which is which anyway... aging's natural normalization of personal bias!
Even for audio use there are a lot of different applications like
- line stage low gain/unity gain (buffer)
- line stage, high gain (microphone amplifier)
- RIAA stages with RIAA in the NFB network
- power amp front end (two versions - signal pad by output and by power supply rails)
- two version of low pass/high pass stages in active crossover networks (e. g. MFB, and Sallen-Key configuration)
- state variable filter
- several equalizer versions
It doesn't matter and one can say that the result regarding the best OP-amp is the same regardless of the respective application ??
Whether the reverse is also possible ??
I. e. determining the OP-AMP type based on the sound character.
I would like to find out the types of unknown OP AMP IC's that have been sanded off.
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