BS Cavalli LL Concerns

Another liquid lightning owner?

1.) I can't comment on this due to make lack of amplifier knowledge in general. I believe some changes were made to the Liquid Lightning MKII over the Liquid Lightning MKI. @dBel84 could you assist?

2.)Cavalli manuals are hosted on Avenson's site still: https://avensonaudio.com/cavalli-manuals-archive/

 

It's the predecessor to the LL2 - 'eXStatA' hybrid. There used to be a BOM and build manual IIRC.

 

Ah, I misunderstood. Guess I was just hoping to find another LL owner somewhere!

The eXstata was one of the DIY builds IIRC which would mean a schematic should be somewhere. I can't help with that though. dbel is our expert so he's the best shot we've got.

 

OH MY GAWD not this again. this was the worst thing that has ever happened to this hobby. Kevin Gilmore and Spritzer got a huge ego hard on after discovering build quality problems with Singlepower amps and when that exposure to the public was over, they needed more fuel for their egos. Every single amplifier on the market was touted by them as either a piece of shit with build quality issues, or if they couldn't figure out how to say that, then they would say it was a copy of one of Kevin Gilmore's designs. A lot of the claims they made about Cavalli amp designs were straight up lies, I know because a close friend of mine is a close friend of Cavalli's, helped design many of the amps and new their designs through and through, and he would tell me frustratingly that they were straight up lies and the amps were not designed that way.

Once Kevin Gilmore and Spritzer could no longer ride the ego wave they got from Singlepower they literally embarked on a propaganda campaign to tarnish the reputations of everyone but Gilmore.

If you want to know who the people on Head-case really are, look at the amps they own. Before KG/Sprtzer's "discoveries" about Singlepower, everyone on head-case owned Singlepower amps. I know because I went to meets when the community was still together, and there were Singlepower MPX3 amps everywhere, and other models too. They were by far the most popular. And they all thought they sounded great.

After KG/Spritzer's propaganda war, all of those people suddenly switched to Kevin Gilmore amps. All of them. Talk about lemmings. I know a lot of them personally and they're good people, but they drank the koolaid in gallon buckets.

I do not trust a thing Kevin Gilmore or Spritzer say, and will never own a Gilmore amp. He is likely the reason Cavalli lost so much of his joy and love for this hobby that he went out of business and we never saw the real balanced Liquid Crimson he was working on, the Liquid Platinum (the Monoprice version is not a representation of his original design) nor any future designs he might have come up with.

This era of the headphone hobby is shameful, disgusting and petty, and not much else,

 

The Exstata/Cavalli website is available on the internet archive here: http://web.archive.org/web/20160110...iaudio.com/diy/exstata/main.php?page=overview

 

Thank you very much Mr. Beefy

 

Balanced Crimson? I wish I could have seen that one. Probably a balanced Glass there in his mind too.
Liquid Tungsten, what could have been...

 

I thought that's what the Monoprice Liquid Platinum was

 

That's what it was marketed as but...not even close.

 

Glad you were able to find the schematics for the DIY electrostatic amp - the commercial amps did address some of the "concerns" raised ( the stax amps are also built with these same "concerns" ) but it is moot now as CA has closed its doors for good.

The crimson started life as a balanced proof of concept for a power amp and it was mind blowingly good and was released as an SE amp.

seeing as there are questions

there was a phono amp , preamp , balanced power glass amongst other things

The Tungsten - this was an OTL/OCL power tube amp - people really liked it , there were 5 prototypes made that disappeared in the breeze of the doors closing.

 

Oh man - I'd love to hear any other details you or others might have re: Tungsten.

 

Found this picture online of the Tungsten:


edit: plus a bunch more here:
https://audiobacon.net/2017/03/25/cavalli-audio-liquid-tungsten-preview/

 

There were a couple that didn't make it to production. Not sure what happened. IIRC a couple of bad builders of the DIY stuff kind of put a bad taste into a few peoples mouths. Boilermakerfan / Brian did me a disservice with a project of mine - on top of having me digitize the Cavalli logo for possibly his own projects.

I believe the channel imbalance in my eXStatA is at the pot. - I still have my PM from dbel with troubleshooting tips. Any suggestions on a 4-gang pot? It currently has an alps blue which might be the culprit of the imbalance.

 

That name rings a bell. Not a good bell. There were a lot of cowboys during those days.

Just straight up measure it with a multimeter in VAC. Feed the amp a 0 dbfs 50 or 60 Hz signal. Check before-pot voltage, after-pot voltage, and output voltage. Do it at a few different volume levels.

I bet you'll find the pot is fine. Either the gain on one channel is off, or the output is perfect and one driver is likely quieter than the other.

 

It's and ESP/950 with a Stax Pro adapter. I've rolled tubes, gone from SE to BAL, switch L/R across inputs. It always stay 3db down. It doesn't jump to 6db from my memory when switched to BAL. The E90 energizer has no problem being balanced as the L/R 'lines' lined up.

Could possibly cut the XLR out from front to back and run a nice stepper.

 

@M3NTAL There is a nice digital attenuator on DiyAudio that can be built SE stereo or balanced, but it needs its own power supply so maybe more hassle than needed.

The Alpha 4-gang track reasonably well, my preferred balanced pots are the ones from TKD

Re tungsten, there are a few posts out there from various reviews. They were mostly lent out to vendors and mysteriously disappeared when Alex started to close down.

No one will be able to build one easily, a ton of microprocessor control to keep the big tubes biased. I know that Avenson has the last one (I had it and sent it back after everything had wrapped up)

 

And this is why we are still waiting for you to start planning a dBel84 tube amp or probably it's just me... daydreaming.

 

Not just you, I'm waiting for the dB amp lineup too.

 

When I quit my day job [ at which point I will likely have lost my marbles ]