Consider this...

sweetbeats

Reel deep thoughts...
I'm reading through a series of articles forwarded to me by Rick Chinn of Uneeda Audio written by Steve Dove on "Designing a Professional Mixing Console". This series was originally published in Studio Sound from 1980 to '81. As I pass a 2000th post milestone I thought to put up an excerpt from one of the articles discussing opamps; the title subheaded "Friend or Foe?"...:rolleyes:...that debate continues on today on many fronts...opamps vs. discreet electronics, Protools vs. everybody else, analog vs. digital...seriously don't want to go there again but Steve Dove is very objective about the opamp issue and he opens the article with some words that really made me think about my own past and current behavior and mindset about what's good/better/best/necessary/garbage/blahblahblah, and so many of my opinions are based on what others say, not my own hands-on experience.

So this is really a confession of sorts and reminder to myself that my own experiences and results with what I have on-hand mean more at that moment than all the puffy-worded absolutes of others...our culture and society is really quick these days to jump to the next thing and usually it is somebody in marketing that is hoping you'll react that way, and is typically getting paid based on your response. So here's to the journey "backwards" against the flow of the market to something that transcends "fashion".

Steve Dove writes in the November 1980 edition of Studio Sound:

"Fashions change, the laws of physics don't. A simple and irrefutable statement, one would think. Unfortunately this industry, like most of the others which survive off the entertainment media, is populated with large numbers of persons who persistently refuse to believe it. Such are the individuals who are responsible for sweeping condemnations based on statements that tickle the sense of plausability rather than sufficient breadth of comprehension and depth of knowledge to substantiate or explain them. So many of these proclamations are made for political and commercial reasons, totally unrelated to actual technological facts.

Such are the statements from which fashions are born - inertia sweeping them forward until the original criticisms have been well laid to rest but the engendered antipathy lingers on irrationally, supported dim-wittedly by those similarly incapable of substantiating their own opinions. Sadly, in an industry where abstract notions are a stock-in-trade and everybody has a pair of ears it is quite difficult to make clarifying statements based on fact - someone somewhere will always be at hand to propose yet another set of glazed-eyed contradictory waffle."

And I am now at risk of forming yet another set of opinions about opinions based on this excerpt. :o
 
It's as if he was trying to make discreet electronics seem more appealing by emphasizing his verbiage with elegant, large words, much like discreet electronics are much larger in size than electronics possessing op-amps. Larger is smarter and therefore better. Therefore since discreet electronics are larger than op-amps, they must be better than op-amps. You think that's the subliminal message that this author was trying to express?
 
Absolutely not.

Glad you brought that up because the point of the article was that opamps (at that time) were still getting a bad rap over some issues that were more rampant in the early days of opamp technology, but staunch opinions form from those early issues and then they get carried around by people that speak without knowing the whole picture, or who lack the knowledge or experience to be swaying others. We like to talk.

So what the article presents, IMO is that opamps don't "suck" as bad as some purists or purist posers would have you think. I think it was a bigger controversey at that time.

And how this translated to me personally was my past dumping of my 3340S for a relatively horrible sounding Sony TCD-D7 portable DAT unit because it was digital (and, ah...slightly more portable :rolleyes:), and then years and years of striving for better sound by getting the next best digital thingy I could afford...time after time not being satisfied with the sound and so I'd get "better" pre's or something with "better" converters...then it was upgrading to "real" DAW software...then of course there were all the mic upgrades. My skills as an engineer are certainly in question here and that's good. I know I've made lots of bad choices in upgrades simply because I allowed the market to convince me that my results would be better with "real" and "better" gear, but I have made some good choices too when I have been able to use gear and compare to other gear I have used and then absolutely know which one I like better and which one works better for me. But those decisions have been in the minority.

Now...all those hasty unfounded upgrades got sizzled to the ground when I bought, on a hunch, a Tascam 238...a hunch that what I was looking for wasn't going to be found in digital gear within my budget range...a hunch anchored in the sounds I got out of the 3340S. I was absolutely jazzed when I had more warmth and life in a scratch test recording on that 238 than I had been able to reach with any of the digital gear. Was it me? Was it my gear? I don't know but the 238 worked (well, ah...sort of...except for tracks 1, 7 and 8 which were messed up...I returned it). But that started the upstream swim.

So, I've made a bunch of hasty decisions with analog gear now too, but I think I'm headed in the right direction...and my favorite pre's out of everything I have? The oldest...the ones that have been chastised in other places...the M-520. Hands-down I like them the best over a Presonus Digimax FS, Yamaha i88x or 01X. Those pre's are great don't get me wrong. They are nice and clean and quiet, but the M-520 pre's have warmth and body too them. Its probably a combination of things, most of which are probably right in line with why the market says I should run from the M-520 pre's.
 
Interesting. I'm not too versed in the differences between op amps and discreet electronics, in fact I've always wondered what discreet was, but I can relate to the gear conquest thing. I've found out the hard way that sometimes the sound you are going to get is mainly in the deck you're recording on rather than any outboard gear you can find.
 
Yeah...

The discreet thing...opamps have lots of stuff in their tiny (relatively speaking) packages...resistors, capacitors, transistors...whereas "discreet electronics" would have all that stuff individually on the circuit board rather than in a chip. Does that make sense?
 
Yeah...

The discreet thing...opamps have lots of stuff in their tiny (relatively speaking) packages...resistors, capacitors, transistors...whereas "discreet electronics" would have all that stuff individually on the circuit board rather than in a chip. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does make sense. Thanks. I was starting to think that's what it might be by what was said above.
 
Interesting. I'm not too versed in the differences between op amps and discreet electronics, in fact I've always wondered what discreet was, but I can relate to the gear conquest thing. I've found out the hard way that sometimes the sound you are going to get is mainly in the deck you're recording on rather than any outboard gear you can find.

Discreet opamps are the ones that blush when you tell an off color joke. Discrete opamps are the ones made of individual components as opposed to those made of integrated components.

Regards! :)

-Ethan
 
Here is a Burson discreet opamp I used in my Azuntech prelude sound card. It now does duty in my headphone amp circuit of my Sony ES TA-E80ES analog preamp. Sounds mighty fine, but so does the OPA627 I used to compare it with...
 

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And I am now at risk of forming yet another set of opinions about opinions based on this excerpt. :o

Don't think of any of these things (opamps vs. discreet electronics, analog vs. digital, misc. vs. etc.) as differing opinions; think of them as different options.

-MD
 
This goes way back, though. Though it's before any of our time (unless you're 90+ years old and you're on this forum) there was considerable resistance to the advent of electronic recording in the early 20's when electronic amplification became practical. Prior to that, all recordings were cut acoustically. The band would be positioned in front of a large horn of some kind, and the acoustic energy of the sound would physically move the stylus and cut the record or cylinder. Then, when electronic amplification came around, they were able to begin using microphones, and allowing electronics to send electromagnetic signals to the stylus, meaning the electromagnetic currents physically moved the stylus and cut the record or cylinder.

Early versions of this system had their limitations, and likely the acoustic method sounded much better than the electronic method for quite some time. Therefore there was much resistance to the electronic recording method, and many die-hard engineers continued cutting acoustically well into the late 30's. Eventually electronic technology and microphone/preamp design far surpassed the sound quality of acoustic recordings, not to mention the ability to place band members wherever, and not have to crowd them around a single horn while recording.
 
Then .... electronic amplification came around,...[and "they" 've got]... the ability to place band members wherever....

...and
Then .... digital recording came around,...[and "they" 've got]... the ability NOT to place any band members anywhere....

:D
*******************
sweetbeats said:
...own hands-on experience.
"Own" is not fashionable.
It's no longer "he", she", "i", it's only "us", "we", "them" and the unity in "common consensus". And on the day, when the Castle crumbles to dust - non of "us" individually will have anything to do with it.
:mad:
 
action reaction , hard to explain this in english

Its very interesting how everytime the man introduces some kind of technology theres allways people who accept the changes and groups of people
that prefer to hold on to what they know, imo is something natural, if it works why change then.

Reading Umberto Ecos book Apocalypse Postponed Ive found one deep quote, while pop music appeared ( book was written in the early 60s ) people changed their point of view about music , and how the amateur musician was losing weight in the society, the place were a piano or a guitar was a big entertainment for the whole family, then was substituted by radio, television and vynils...( now u can think about videogames here )

Book is hard to read but its very appealing from a musicians point of view ( he even predicts homestudios and how from consumers well turn into creators !)

Everything must be seen from an industrial society point of view, and how theres so much pressure leading us to do, to think and live how some people want to. But some analog still sound better !:cool:, in my opinion of course,,,,
 
Hey thanks everybody for taking the thoughts somewhere.

Don't think of any of these things (opamps vs. discreet electronics, analog vs. digital, misc. vs. etc.) as differing opinions; think of them as different options.

Yes, definitely. I guess my point was that, since I've been so quick to form hard hands-off opinions in the past about things based on what someone may say, I was really poking fun at myself for forming yet another opinion about what Steve Dove says about opinions. Hehheh.

The deeper you get into the theory and technicalities of it the muddier it becomes, and so for somebody like me who lacks that level of technical expertise and training it is really a waste of time, though it is interesting to me. It always comes back to the question "how does it sound?" This is something I will never forget that pianodano asked in a directed way as I was tweaking-tweaking-tweaking my Tascam 58 based all on test tones and he asked "yeah, but how does it sound?" And I was like "what do you mean", but his teaching moment becomes more meaninful to me all the time.

The reality is that, for most of us on this forum we feel that a certain genre of gear "sounds" more pleasing even though the spec sheets falter in comparison to "modern" digital equipment. So whether "it" (say, a mixer for instance) is loaded with valve electronics, discreet solid-state electronics, opamps (or further yet whether it is loaded with 4558's, 072's, 5532's, 2134's and so on) should be measured against the litmus test of "how does it sound?"

ZEE has really got me thinking these days...I've been recapping stuff bit by bit, and often while I'm "in there" I'm looking at what opamps were used and tossing around upgrading some since I have some upgrades on-hand. One such unit is my Tascam RS-20B dual stereo spring reverb. It uses 4558's and I was thinking that upgrading those to 2134's might be a nice idea. I don't remember what Mike said but basically encouraged me to leave it alone because in a sense it would no longer be an RS-20B, not from the afficiando "must be all original" standpoint, but rather with the thought in mind that those opamps don't operate in a vacuum. Their behavior is interdependent on the rest of the path and part of what I might like about the RS-20B's slurriness might be those older slower noiser 4558's, and maybe I wouldn't even be able to hear the difference...but this struggle started because I formed an opinion about 4558's based on something I read.

Another case in point which I mentioned over in my thread on the M-___ mixer is that I ran program material through it for the first time a couple weeks ago doing a final systems check on my Tascam 48 which will soon be on its way to its new owner, lo.fi.love. Anyway, stereo program material from a pre-recorded CD (Jack Johnson) played on a laptop with the D/A handled by a Tascam US-224 sounded really great to my ears. The M-___ channel strips have (IIRC) 22 opamps each...some handling circuit logic, but many of them (over half for sure) are handling audio...072's, 4556's and 2041's. Standard Teac fare for the day. I was going to go on an upgrade field day on that thing...I'm leaving it alone although I'm going to finish what I started and upgrade select opamps on just the first two channels and those I'll use for more critical sources and to handle the stereo sum for mixdown. Again, it was all opinion-based. I like to tinker, but its more than that when it is about "I gotta make it 'better'", and that is so subjectively dangerous when you are like me, late 30-something and having been involved with performing music for 15 ~ 20 years and recording for half or more of that but only into the technical stuff for the last few years.

"Better" is what drew me to digital. Today I understand what the benefits and place of digital are for me, but I do believe, as HomeGos posted for consideration, that as a global culture we are moving more toward being spectators and less as active physical participants in many things, and I feel that maintaining a reel deck, repairing gear, smelling tape and mechanics are part of participating in the music making process. I'd much rather be spending time doing that kind of maintenance and experiencing those kinds of experiences as the sounds are captured than wading through plugins and tweak-tweak-tweaking to fix the last tweak. That problem (plugin abuse) is my own failed approach, but the digital world leaves it wide open and for me it takes me down a wrong path.
 
plugin abuse, maybe a new thread

hard to resist temptation and easy to end in a mix with no end , thats about plugin abuse, speacially when your aproach to mix , ( I think you use your own ears ), is so subjective, or it lacks pro skills

In my experience plugins are designed to be used but also, to be seen, kind of hypnotic, colours, buttons, graphs, lights on, lights off, that can lead to distraction often. I ve had enough, for me its not fun. I need a whole lot of time to be the engineer, the musician and also the producer, composer, singer, bassplayer, guitar player, and keyboardist etc...

Have so much of them, then I hold to the few ones I know, but still havent found a good reverb on a plugin

You know we are on a wheel where companies need to create on us the urgency, the lack, the need to have the latest on everything, but that doesnt mean we really need it

And Im not a communist! hahahahaha
 
Depends on your needs or whose opinion you choose to adopt...! Right?

As far as I'm concerned, they're a friend. They created problems but solved some issues of discreet electronics, and they brought functionality to lower cost bracket for the masses. Now, I suppose that there are those that think that was a bad thing because, for example, it put tools in the hands of uneducated barbarians like myself. Well, hm. In that case I suppose it is alright to tell the unknown and unschooled painter that his/her art isn't real because they aren't painting using expensive brushes. Let the artist express. Nobody can take that from an artist. The artist has to be ready to have their art critiqued if it is shared with the outside world and some may call it art and some may not; nobody can take that away from the spectator either. But in the end the brush doesn't make a lick of difference as to whether or not the painting is art to the artist, or whether or not the painting stirs the onlooker and they call it "art"...granted you can't do a native 16-track project on an 8-track deck...the tools do at some point limit what is possible, but we're talking the microcosm of the amplification circuit in an audio path and when I see a painting that stirs me I'm not wondering what kind of brush they used and neither do I care whether it was discreet electronics or opamps or what kind of opamps were in the signal chain of a recording I really like. I'm curious about more macro things I suppose...was it tracked to analog? Digital? Where? How? And that is for my own education, but I don't think I'm going to be more stirred by something tracked with upgraded opamps vs. stock...At that point I figure I'm not listening to the music anymore if I'm asking those kinds of questions.

I like opamps...they're neat-o.
 
I've read that e.g. 4558 are quieter than 1458 opamps, so for whatever reason they are, there can be an advantage to *upgrading* opamps, or even in newer opamps. I've had this debate before: I think my 1970s vintage receiver **sounds** better with its big iron transformers and big heavy capacitors etc, then a new receiver using ic's. Or maybe I just dig the big cool backlit tuner dial with the big knob....:D
 
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