Raytheon RC4558NB

[thermionix]

I saw some of these on Ebay, not too expensive, so I thought I'd try them out.  Don't know how old they are, but I don't think Raytheon has made them in quite a while.  Late 70s maybe?  I'm not sure, but they may have been the forerunner of the TI version RC4558P (?).

The sonic differences between 4558s of different manufacturers can be extremely subtle, and maybe sometimes purely imaginary.  Not so subtle in this case, these chips sound like crap!  Well, in a Tube Screamer anyway.  Thin and fizzy, makes the TS sound a bit like a Dist+ with the gain cranked up.  I have 3 screamers here, all slightly different, two of them have sockets, so the third served as a control.  I wasn't expecting magic, but I didn't think they could sound bad either.  I think they're worse than any of the oddball opamps some TS9 versions came with.

So, back to TI and JRC!  Maybe these Raytheons will work better in a different circuit.  I hope so, because I now have 20 of the little bastards.

[thermionix]

On second thought...I played around with these a little more, and they aren't quite as bad as I made it sound above, but still I think I like both the TIs and JRCs better.  Seems I'm getting a little more distortion out of the Raytheons for some reason, and that was just turning me off yesterday when I did my comparison.  Probably all the 4558 varieties favor specific clipping diodes over others.

[MaxPower]

I suspect they'd all favor germanium.

Or maybe that's just me.

[Oti]

I'm looking for exactly 20 rc4558nb, let me know if you want to get rid of them, I'd like to buy them all