Super Low THD+N [Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge]

Published: August 2, 2007, 2:21 pm

On the audio front, National Semiconductor, long a player in analog semiconductors, has announced a couple new op amp families producing a total harmonic distortion plus noise spec of 0.00003%. These devices are aimed squarely at higher end audio applications and also offer a very low voltage noise spec of 2.7 nanovolts per root-Hertz with a flicker noise corner of 60 Hertz. I find these numbers to be pretty impressive, especially considering a starting price of $1.35 per unit in 100's (up to about $10 depending on package and other details). During my college days it was something to find devices with THD specs much below 0.1%, and even the best distortion analyzers were at least an order of magnitude above these little op amps. Also, "low noise" devices rarely broke the 5 nV barrier (the venerable 5532 comes to mind) and they almost always had a lower noise corner frequency well above 100 Hz. In spite of the ready availability of low cost yet high performance analog

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