La 2 limiter home brew question 2

[John Fisher]

Here is another question I had about my LA 2 clones. I have been eliminating the output transformer in my clones using a half decent coupling capacitor and a few attenuation resistors and it works just fine. I don't care much about having a balanced output especially considering that my cables are all relatively short. I am still very pleased with the sound and it costs about 100 bucks less. Any comments on that? Also considering unlike the late fifties, just about everything you will ever put in the signal path will have a least some OP amps especially going into a computer, So why not eliminate that other costly input transformer and just stick in an Op amp with a balanced input for mics. I believe that the original LA 2 was just designed for line in signals but I have used a mic input transformer (Jensen) for this. I also had to add an extra preamp tube to make it work good. Up until now I am not complaining as the thing sounds great! but getting back to the original question would it be so terrible to use an op amp for the mic input?
Thanks for any input. You guys are great!

[soundguruman]

In studio world, transformer is always the lowest noise...
but that depends on how good a transformer.
Good transformer with excellent frequency response is very, very, expensive.

Op amp is good alternative to save money. Especially when the application is not critical, noise wise.
If it sounds great, than you have done the job very well !

You will never get an op amp to work like (as good as) a transformer, but you don't need it to work like that anyway.

The idea in transformer was to drive very long wires, without losses. Op amp can't really do that. The frequency response suffers greatly.
But in shorter wires the op amp does OK.