Best opamp IC for overdrive circuit?

[Tom Gorr]

Back in the day when I was interested in solid state... pedals etc. .. there was an op amp IC that was in the original run of tube screamers. .. and they got the reputation of having the best tone in a clipping circuit. I think it may have been JRC4558 or something but it has been a decade and I don't recall with certainty.

Given the slate of new opamp ICs was wondering if other s have been discovered that surpass the JRC in a clipping circuit..?

[Ole Dantoft]

Tom,
Not exactly what you asked for I know, but if you do a Google search for "tl072 in tubescreamer" you'll get a gazillion results with many interesting discussions.

Why TL072 you say?
When the TS808 first came to my attention way-back-when, it came in the form of one that I borrowed from a friend who just always had to have the latest equipment available and he asked if I wanted to test it.

After testing it I immediately knew that I needed a TubeScreamer, but I was still training as an electronics engineer, so I simply couldn't afford one, so I took it apart, jotted down the schematic and built one myself.

When it came to choosing the OP-AMP I simply went to the drawer with "Dual OP-AMPs" and we had no JRC4558's in stock, the 1458 was known to be rather inferior already then but we had plenty of TL072's so I used that and nobody could tell my clone from the original.

I don't actually think that using a modern day HiFi OP-AMP like the OPAxxx's will necessarily yield better results in a decidedly LoFi application like an overdrive pedal, but that's just my opinion.

Ole

[Alan W. Black]

There's a pedal guru named Jack Orman who believes the performance of the original 4558 can be beat by the TL072. Don't know about that, but I did replace the 4558s in my boss eq with 72s and got measurably less noise and no loss in performance at all.