OPamps still inferior to discrete circuits?

Kijanki
Exactly :-) The burr browns get good reps on headphones, they do produce a certain ambience thats nice.. But if your looking for a raw out rock power with detailed sound they are a bit laid back in many designs.. Again going discrete in fact will take about 20 times the Space as an op amp and way more parts and cost! A good op amp based unit is fine, some cases might be just as good as with some Digital equipment and headphones, so op amps have their place no doubt, and cost effective for sure, a comprable discrete circuit in general the parts alone can cost 100 times the single chip, and just wont even be physically useable in many designs easily. If you can fit it go for it!

My limited experience with the OPA627 is indeed a bit laid back sound. It sounds clean and "transparent", but altogether it doesn't sound very engaging in the long term. I think a discrete layout (a well designed one of course) would give more harmonic richness/complexity to the sound.

Chris

Chris - It might "give more harmonic richness/complexity" if you already have rest of the system that you are happy with. I need to spend money on speakers.

Audio always has been neglected an there is only a handful of opamps designed specifically for the audio. Even one mentioned by Undertow (AD843) as great sounding wasn't designed for the audio (no mention of it or any THD data) but rather as fast settling amp to use as buffer for A/D converters or peak capture or sample/hold circuits.


I am afraid that such advances like SACD come to us only because they have absolute copy protection and not for the sound.

Dgarretson, sorry for the late reply.
If you read more about the ASR Emmiter II Exclusive Battery amp, you will find out that its preamp sections runs on high-current batteries heavily bypassed with high-quality capacitors. This amp has 3 extra PS boxes that weigh about 100 pounds.
The Burson discrete opamps and the original OPA627 opamps were compared with the same (close to perfect) power supply.
Specs are just specs...trust your ears. I have trusted mine and do not regret it.
For a discussion on discrete opamps and their superior sound as compared to chip opamps, start here:
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/discrete/discrop.htm
then take a look at (and listen to samples of) the state of the art opamps used by recording studios that care:
http://www.thelisteningsessions.com/session9.htm
best regards

There are advantages of both. Discrete circuits can be made for some special characteristics (such as very high voltage or lowest possible noise for some given source impedance), or customized with features that just don't have enough of a market to interest IC designers.

But there are some things that can be done in integrated circuits that just can't be done in fully discrete circuits, such as extremely high inherent transistor matching and highest possible thermal coupling between devices that need to track to work right.