Alright technical question for anyone who knows electrical engineering stuff: my understanding is this: triode tubes require less or no feedback because they’re basically linear and low current so you can just control their gain with some resistors and don’t need feedback to linearize the output. Transistors require some feedback, but discrete transistors tend to require less feedback than op-amps, because op-amps are designed to be capable of enormous amounts of gain so you need to poor on feedback to lower than down, but the result is the claimed issues with time smearing created by lots of feedback. (As per this article by Uncle Paul: Smearing – PS Audio )
So my question is this, if anyone knows—if a discrete op-amp is put into the same circuit as an integrated op-amp, doesn’t it have the same amount of feedback coming around back to the other end of the op-amp, and so wouldn’t it have the same time smearing issues? If so, why do discrete op-amps seem to have more soundstage and depth than integrated op-amps despite this?