Ever wonder why Mexicans love beer and their music often features tubas and brass instruments playing what sounds like polka music? An interesting question since the country we now know as Mexico was founded by the Spanish who do not share those same traits.
And the answer, obviously, was the influence of Germans and Austrians who flooded into the country in the 19th century after a crazy set of events that wound up planting an Austrian fellow in the role of emperor.
The point of all this is thinking about origins and how it helps our understanding of technology to look back at those beginnings.
For example, how and why we moved from IC op amps to discretes and then back again.
In the 70s, at the start of the integrated circuit era, we were all enamored with the ease and beauty of a pre-designed little amplification block called an IC. On paper, those rascals were amazing: super low distortion, bandwidth out the wazoo, and no noise. What's not to like?
The sound.
Because those general purpose amplifier blocks were designed to do everything for everyone they wound up doing nothing great for niche applications like high end audio. And the reason for this is the specific requirements for great sound: low open loop gain, high slew rate, and class A bias—traits no IC op amps had back then.
So, we designed our own circuits using lots of little discrete parts and the benefits were immediately apparent.
Move forward many decades and today there are IC amplifiers whose performance is so good that our attempts at discrete versions would be near impossible because we cannot match tolerances as well as the chip guys.
So, where we are today is a function of where we've been as we climb the rungs of the progress ladder.
It's always good to look back to remind us to look with fresh eyes at today's technology to make sure we're not rehashing what worked so well in the past just because that's the way we always did it.
