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[zerostargeneral]

I just hit the like for the first time Sir,

Morricab,you hit the nail firmly on the head.

Don and CJ very cleverly,in my opinion,outlined the realities of the music performance,capture and production dance.

Bravo Sirs,

Kindest regards,G.

 

[microstrip]

Yes, and tubes are more popular than ever and still sound better than ICs. Studies have been performed that show the overload potential for opamps is far lower than tubes...a high tolerance that is necessary for live recording to not sound distorted.

Ok, I was talking about technical aspects, you want to turn it in a beauty contest and propagate old audio findings concerning low power solid state amplifiers that are meaningless for what we were debating. Surely saturation voltage of ICs is lower than that of tubes, but the important point is dynamic range. Modern ICs are extremely low noise, they have higher dynamic range than IC's.
In the 80's I had to use Keithley picoamperimeters with tube inputs in the laboratory - solid state was not as good as the tube. In the late 90's picoamperimeters with front circuits using ICs outperformed the tube ones by two orders of magnitude.

 

[microstrip]

There was an interesting study published in the mid-1970s where a recording engineer decided to investigate why he was hearing a deterioration in the sound at many recording studios. The major change he found was the switch to SS throughout the chain. They then looked at tube, discrete transistor and op amps and found that op amps (at that time) had poor tolerance for being overdriven, something that happens frequently in live music capture. Discrete transistors were a bit better and tubes much better in this regard. However, they also noted the tubes sounded more natural even below the overdrive thresholds. Maybe it applies less today...at least below overdrive...but it is well known that high feedback circuits , which op amps inherently are, don’t react well to being overloaded, so modern ones likely have similar issues.

Ok, most people know about it. If you look at operational amplifier history you will see that you are reporting on the initial phase of their development - BTW students are still tough about the OP741 (released in 68 and used everywhere in subsequent years) because it is an excellent device to learn about imperfections and the effect of poor real parameters in design using operational amplifiers. It was not just overdrive, it was also slew rate limitations, something many users did not understand at that time.

However 50 years passed since that time - fortunately people learned a lot since them! My posts do not address the dark age of audio.

Still waiting for your list of reference D-to-D. They could helps us explaining our mutual findings.