OP AMP Capabilities in Supporting 24 bit bandwidth

I don't know anything about this particular OP amp, but..

1...Every OP amp circuit I ever saw had about 60 transistors.
2... Every OP amp circuit I ever saw had a complementary circuit topography. (That's part of the reason for so many transistors).
3... "16 Bit resolution" is a roundabout way of saying it has a dynamic range of 96 dB.

It may be a good preamp and a good OP amp, but I get a bad feeling when specmanship is evident.

I checked out this preamp, and find that it has only 6dB gain, with a switch option for unity gain. It is easy to get distortionless ("transparent") performance from a low or unity gain amp. The trick is to do it with about 30 dB or more gain. I guess you could call this item a "straight wire without gain".

Svenss1...Yes, 30 dB would be a bit high for the line stage, but I was thinking in terms of a phono preamp, where considerably more than 30 dB overall is necessary. Also, the line stage usually has excess gain, which is attenuated by the volume control. The circuitry may actually be producing 4 or 5 volts, which is cut back to the 1 or so that it takes to drive the power amp.

On your "other note" I don't understand it either.

My first reaction to Sean's comment about the benefit of a noise floor much lower than other ICs and far below audibility is "so what". But then I remembered my own experience in designing tests of complex electromechanical equipment, and my insistance, (against strong resistance from bosses and even the customer, the US Navy) on implementing procedures that were significantly more accurate than the test accuracy spec we had to meet. My argument was that there will be sources of test error that will come to light later, and so you do each part of the procedure as well as you know how so as to leave room for these circumstances. More than once there was near panic when a new error source was discovered, and I was a hero when I could stand up and say "it's OK. We still meet requirements".

But, this (overly?) conservative approach did cost you poor taxpayers some money :-)

The dean of the mechanical engineering school where I went told us that the final exam would be to design a ten ton crane hook, and stand under it as full load was applied.

For most things, worst case analysis is not conservative enough...a "safety factor" is added. However, sometimes you must go with something less than worst case, so that a failure is not impossible. The best example of this that I know is the plumbing of a multifloor apartment house. You simply cannot design for the situation where every toilet in the building is flushed at the same moment. Few airplanes have the structural strength to withstand aerodynamic forces that the pilot can easily cause by manipulation of the controls. (And I fly to Arazona tomorrow).

Sean...And to lower the tone a bit further, consider the design of residential sewage disposal fields. For ages everyone designed for "worst case" and then made it larger for "good measure".

Turns out that an oversized field is a bad idea. Parts of it will dry out, and the microbes that break down the sewage will die.

In audio (remember that) I once thought to improve a regulated power supply by adding capacitance. Bad idea. The regulator became unstable.

So I guess that every situation must be understood and accomodated in the design.
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