TI NE5532 Audio Opamp Changes

[julian1]

Creating confusion is good if it means there's a chance to upsell the customer to a better specified product.
I wonder how management evaluate and weight the marginal cost benefit with the risk of growing customer dissatisfaction with the extra review work being pushed on them.
Have TI updated their tina-ti models?
How do they manage the versioning, and invalidation of old models?

[pope]

TI should have been upfront and given a long EOL notice for the 5532/5534 so people could stock up. After that, kiss the product goodbye. Instead, they chose to mislead their customers.

Whether this is an issue only for older products or not, is totally irrelevant. There're still a lot of new products that use 5532s and 5534s. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using a 553x on a new design.

[floobydust]

Mega-conglomerates are just big dinosaurs. Eat to no end - acquire, loot and pillage, cheapen... all in the name of their main goal - maximum profit.
TI datasheets also show unnecessary chopping and deleting pages, as if some dept. needs to justify their existence. Major loss of technical app notes and legendary content. I grieve the loss of NS datasheets and app notes.

TI stock YTD up 76%? I would say just from price gouging lol https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TXN/ $278B market cap so better squeeze pennies from the NE5532 

Thing is, the NE5534/NE5532 are from an era of analog audio and they were good game changers in LP record, recording consoles and tape machines. Cheap mic preamps.
Today, people plop one down on the output of a DAC and well, it just does poorly, as a misapplication. There was no xxMHz CM present in the 70's.
Add in the chinese LM358 fakes and the part is high risk despite the low cost.
TI needs to spend their time on better things.

[Kleinstein]

It also begs the question who knows how much TI bastardized the National Semiconductor/Burr-Brown parts as well.
Who got time to pour through ECN's and old datasheets to see if the IC you know has been changed.

They have also changed quite some of the NS parts. AFAIK changes in the TL072 to the CMOS version is also effective / planed for much of the LF35x series.

Changing parts so much and still keep the old name is a really bad practice. Why not be honest and make an old jellybean part obsolete, if they can no longer make it. For the NE5532 there are alternative manufacturers. AFAIK its originaly a Signetics part (bought by phillips and renamed to NXP and now onsemi) anyway.
They already have the RC4580 that looks very much what they sell as the new NE5532 version. If they did some minor changes call it RC4580A or B.

They really should have learned from the mess they created with the TL072H - maybe they did not get enough negative feedback.

[julian1]

The recommendation to avoid specifying vendor parts in schematics is good practice too - in case the manufacturer will substitute the part underneath the name.
Better to maintain a separate BOM detail document, where change/volatility is more easily managed.

[pope]

TI needs to spend their time on better things.

Yes, things like trying to be honest to their customers.

[floobydust]

TI needs to spend their time on better things.

Yes, things like trying to be honest to their customers.

Why bother? Profit is more important than corporate honesty. Committing fraud is reasonable in order to return value to shareholders. See Boeing, Nikola, Theranos, VW and many more.

I thought semiconductors get better as the decades roll on. You know, better parts, lower costs... and yet TI gives us less.
It must be to protect their ridiculously priced boutique op-amps.

NE5532 released April 1979. It's output 10VRMS with +/-18V into 600 ohm loads. I think the TI bastard can't come close. It's also 5V/usec compared to the original 9V/usec slew rate "Changed Slew rate value from 9V/μs to 5V/μs".
New datasheet: "Removed Maximum peak-to-peak output voltage swing, Small-signal differential-voltage amplification, Maximum output-swing bandwidth, Output impedance, Crosstalk attenuation".
It's like a Kardashian datasheet now, more about cosmetics. Sigh.

[David Aurora]

I'll be curious to see how long it is before someone pops the hood on the new ones to compare dies under a microscope. Would be interesting to see on the changed TL07X chips too.

[tom66]

Given we use a lot of analog componentry in our products we need to have an urgent review. If any TI parts are used they need to be requalified / replaced.  Very sour taste here.

[pope]

It's not just the 553x. The TI forums are full of comments from customers trying to figure out why their products fail. HEre's an example for the OPA314 and 2134

https://e2e.ti.com/search?q=opa2134&category=forum&sort=date%20desc

Also, as it has already been mentioned on some other audio forums, they completely removed all references to 600 Ohm drive among other things. I can post many topics but I'm not sure about the policy of the forum.


So, no more TI products for me but who cares...

[Zero999]

Interestingly the new LM317M, has better specifications than the old one, but in light of the LLM317L, I question whether it's an error on the data sheet.

[EEVblog]

So Dave, should we expect a video on this?

Yeah, thinking about it...

[Alex Nikitin]

It's not just the 553x. The TI forums are full of comments from customers trying to figure out why their products fail. HEre's an example for the OPA314 and 2134

I'm especially impressed by removal of the offset adjustment pins on the OPA134 (and a simultaneous increase in the typ/max input offset values in the datasheet ! )  .

Cheers

Alex

P.S. - and "TI_Guru" "Raymond Zhang1" comment was:

In this part, the previous the trim pin features are removed in the new FAB due to more consistent process; and the change may affect the existing Vos adjustment (if it is used in the circuit). So perform the comparisons will be the best way to see if there are incompatible behaviors in your existing Pass/Fail functionality tests.

"the change may affect the existing Vos adjustment" 

[tooki]

What irritates me about this entire situation is that I don’t see what TI thinks it stands to gain by doing it. In reality, they’re discontinuing old designs, which is sometimes annoying, but fundamentally fine. I see only downsides from introducing a new design under the old part number: angry customers, possibly lots of e-waste from nonfunctional circuits that were built with the new parts.

I mean, if customers have to re-qualify their designs, they may as well do so with a different part number. Whether that’s an NE5532C or OPA something or another, it’s the same process…

[exe]

what TI thinks it stands to gain by doing it.

I think they think that 99% of engineers won't notice a difference, so they push parts that are significantly cheaper than competition, or at least cheaper to produce. So, they gain market share and/or profits.

[Simmed]

wow
this should be a new model
like NE5h1t

[madires]

So we need a list with manufacturing codes and datasheet revisions for each revised part which comes without a name change. Let's thank TI for the additional confusion and work.

[tooki]

what TI thinks it stands to gain by doing it.

I think they think that 99% of engineers won't notice a difference

Which would be totally covered by saying “we are discontinuing the NE5532 and NE5532A. NE5532C is on a new process and is a drop-in replacement for typical applications. Please review your design if you rely on the following parameters which have changed: {list of changed specs}”. The 99% who don’t care happily buy the new chip and don’t review the design, and the remainder know what to check for. And most importantly, every TI NE5532 and 5532A would actually be an NE5532 or 5532A, rather than there being incompatible impostors in circulation.

so they push parts that are significantly cheaper than competition, or at least cheaper to produce. So, they gain market share and/or profits.

Perhaps in the short term. I expect in the long term, this will come back and bite them in the ass as people avoid using their parts due to the now-known risk of them making major changes to parts without changing the number.

Customers that really want to save money will also be open to buying from cheap Chinese suppliers. If someone is buying TI (for a part that’s also available elsewhere), then they likely want more than just low cost.

Meanwhile, I would expect that lots of customers will simply start avoiding TI analog parts when others (like OnSemi) are available, since they aren’t pulling these shenanigans.

[tooki]

So we need a list with manufacturing codes and datasheet revisions for each revised part which comes without a name change. Let's thank TI for the additional confusion and work.

Exactly. It boggles the mind that they think this won’t just piss people off…

[David Aurora]

what TI thinks it stands to gain by doing it.

I think they think that 99% of engineers won't notice a difference

Which would be totally covered by saying “we are discontinuing the NE5532 and NE5532A. NE5532C is on a new process and is a drop-in replacement for typical applications. Please review your design if you rely on the following parameters which have changed: [list of changed specs]”. The 99% who don’t care happily buy the new chip and don’t review the design, and the remainder know what to check for. And most importantly, every TI NE5532 and 5532A would actually be an NE5532 or 5532A, rather than there being incompatible impostors in circulation.

so they push parts that are significantly cheaper than competition, or at least cheaper to produce. So, they gain market share and/or profits.

Perhaps in the short term. I expect in the long term, this will come back and bite them in the ass as people avoid using their parts due to the now-known risk of them making major changes to parts without changing the number.

Customers that really want to save money will also be open to buying from cheap Chinese suppliers. If someone is buying TI (for a part that’s also available elsewhere), then they likely want more than just low cost.

Meanwhile, I would expect that lots of customers will simply start avoiding TI analog parts when others (like OnSemi) are available, since they aren’t pulling these shenanigans.[/list]

This. They're on my shit list at this point for future orders, I'd rather buy other brands than second guess bog standard parts. I can't imagine many people who make a living in electronics have time for shit like this.

[pope]

It's like they're deliberately trying to piss off their customers

https://e2e.ti.com/support/audio-group/audio/f/audio-forum/1631119/ne5532-specification-chage

[Alex Nikitin]

My overall impression from this debacle is that people at TI now are generally don’t know what they’re doing. That in turn makes every part TI manufactures a suspect and to be avoided.

Cheers

Alex

[nfmax]

It's like they're deliberately trying to piss off their customers

https://e2e.ti.com/support/audio-group/audio/f/audio-forum/1631119/ne5532-specification-chage

If that’s the same Craig Sawyers I knew in my postgrad days I’m not surprised he sounds so pissed off!

Soon, we will be cautioning beginners always to use quality Chinese parts and to avoid American knock-offs

[tooki]

My overall impression from this debacle is that people at TI now are generally don’t know what they’re doing. That in turn makes every part TI manufactures a suspect and to be avoided.

Look at some other examples, like this one:
https://e2e.ti.com/support/power-management-group/power-management/f/power-management-forum/1624391/tlv1117-new-version-of-tlv1117-incompatible-with-old-version

So not only reusing the damned part number, but manufacturing both old and new chips at the same time so that without the box/reel label, you can’t know what’s inside the chip, even by date code! 

https://e2e.ti.com/support/power-management-group/power-management/f/power-management-forum/1529268/tlv1117-new-chip-or-legacy-chip

So, oh yeah, depending on what package you use, it will stay on the old chip. Wtf?

I simply cannot fathom how anyone there thought it was a good idea to make material changes to parts while reusing the part numbers. If you search the TI forums for NE5532, you’ll find several examples of this causing actual problems (as in product failure) due to this. And like us, they’re saying “we are now forced to buy OnSemi”.

[aeg]

This has been discussed here in the forums before:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/lm4562-alternatives-for-lf-sdr-applications/msg6027933/#msg6027933
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/need-help-bullet-proofing-my-audio-balanced-line-receiver-circuit/msg6249615/#msg6249615

For a moment I thought TI might be "crazy like a fox" in poisoning the NE5532 part number so engineers will design in a more expensive TI part rather than specifying a competitor NE5532 and risking that purchasing will substitute the TI part. But after finding out about the LM317 change and especially the TLV1117 change, I think this is just bumbling. From the thread linked by tooki: "The new one doesn't work with most aluminum capacitors and the old one doesn't work with most ceramic capacitors"!