Self on Audio, 3rd Edition

Chapter 43The 5532 OpAmplifier

Part 1: design philosophy and schematics (Elektor, October 2010)

For many years, I wondered if the 5532, with its good load-driving capabilities and very low distortion, could be used to make a power amplifier capable of driving 8Ω by simply wiring a bucketful of them in parallel. This is a more economic proposition than it sounds as the 5532 is also usually the cheapest opamp you lay your hands on, probably because large numbers are used in the output stages of CD players. I found that multipath amplifiers with two, three, or four opamps effectively in parallel worked beautifully to give lower noise and increased load-driving ability. The critical feature in this was the averaging of the opamp outputs by connecting ...