spritzer

IIRC Single Power had 7 year warranty and look where that got people... Just because Cavalli is stupid enough to claim a lifetime warranty of these things doesn't mean anything. He will be replacing all those parts time and time again until they claim it is due to abuse and not covered by the warranty. Story as old as time...

It would also be a good way of adding some much needed angle to the 009 pads.

The Lambda Nova is excellent, nothing short of it. A guy came from Denmark 10 days ago to pickup an amp in person and we naturally made whole listening session out of it. He compared pretty much all of the Lambdas and the LNS was a stand out success. Funny though, he wanted to try the SR-404 (as he has one as well) and my reply...which one? I have three.... SR-404, SR-SC1 and SR-404LE...

Wow...just wow. Gotta hand it to Cavalli for being devious little shits.

Those will burn up in no time. The LC isn't even linear up to 20kHz so I bet it has a very oddly shaped sound.

That's a lot of units and I bet a lot of angry customers. The original owner of this one was certainly glad to be rid of it. One can never forget that about Head-fi, if you are a sponsor then you can have any and all negative posts about removed.

This really should be called Liquid Shit as two Schiit Modi amps are much better than this. Far cheaper too...

I figured I'd start a topic on this where people can actually find info about the amp. I'll quote Kevin's post from the DIY thread in below. As with so many other of these projects, curiosity got the better of me so I actually bought one of these amps. It had gone back to Cavalli to be fixed so no claims possible that it was an early unit and the new ones aren't like this at all. That is the usual Cavalli defense plus that we are doctoring the pics to show his crap in an unflattering light. Well for some pics I'll link in Kevin's post now: So let's discuss what is wrong with this thing. First of all, it's not actually balanced, more a quad of single ended amps which have no reference to each other. Similar to the Woo Wes in that sense. It uses a quad opamp as a phase splitter to deliver a balanced signal to the four modules (there are two on the top of the board and another two on the bottom of the board). That uncovers the first lie, this thing is indeed not fully discrete. Now the second bit, it uses bog standard off the shelf Jfets for input devices for each module, one P- channel and one N-channel. Now these are all made in a pick and place machine so there is no way to match these input fets which is crucial to good performance. Another issue is the low power and the bad choice of output devices. The severely limit the performance of the amp and are driven so low that they barely tick over. Now we come to the power supply, what a steaming pile of shit that is. To save a few cents Cavalli decided to clobber one of those together himself instead of just ordering one from the people who actually know how to do this. I checked and a MeanWell PSU which fits these specs costs 18$ for a single unit, much less when you buy hundreds. How fucking cheap can one manufacturer be? I can't wait to get this here so I can do a proper review of it, Head-fi style. Now we all know that this is just a baby Liquid Gold so I can only imagine how much that one must suck. Never fear though as I will buy one of those so we'll see how horrible it really is.

I'm more worried about Katla than Hekla to be honest. Katla is overdue (hasn't erupted in 98 years) and given that it is covered by a large glacier unlike Hekla... it would mean a lot of ash in the sky. It's also a very big volcano so if it goes, things will not be pretty.

Those will work perfectly. As for the football, yeah it is impressive but goes to show what you can do if you really want something. One funny post I saw was wondering about the current GDP numbers as 10% of the nation will be in France for the flipping game. There is already talk of leasing a fleet of planes to get as many people over there as we can...

The best part of this is the slashing of used prices. That means I can pickup one of these for next to nothing and expose Cavalli again for the piece of shit he really is.

No, it hasn't. Same shitty circuit too made even worse by the retarded SE-XLR converter.

So this is the second time this has happened, gotta love buying Cavalli crap. As for the LL1 sockets, it was just a matter of nobody measuring the Stax pins accurately and sizing the plastic cover for the socket correctly. Took 1 minute to fix that...

Their biggest problem is the real market for this stuff and how grossly they overestimate it. Sure they might sell a few units to the idiots who always follow the latest hype train but what's after that? The hype train moves on very quickly which is where companies like Stax come in. There is no hype, just steady sales all over the world with brand recognition that even the other big boys would kill for. That has certainly been my experience when talking to people from the large companies and Senn especially get very defensive when I propose a shootout between the two brands. They are also doing it all ass backwards, alienating the hard core fan base (aka the Mafia) which would only have helped in the long run. I've said it many times before but HF just doesn't matter any more. It's a place to discuss what ever hyped up crap there is this week and that's all. There is no depth so the people who actually care (and are the backbone of all of this) never go there anymore. Bring on the fucktards whose sole purpose in life is to cozy up to the MOT's to try and get something for free and feel important while doing it.

Funny thing is that we went through this same thing with the Hifiman abominations. They thought that the 5 pin XLR would somehow work but had to include a Stax adapter anyway. All of this is just so stupid, you need the fucking Stax plug anyway which the normal HF member would never understand. Instead they turn this into the usual "let's defend the manufacturer" instead of calling them on their crap. It's amazing that nothing has changed over there in all this time as we had the same shit 10 years ago...

Distortion alone (well THD) is pretty meaningless and says nothing about how it sounds. I also wasn't referring to this thing but their analog engineering in general. Seriously, look up the "balanced" headphone amp or their pre/power amps.

Nothing wrong with that.

Looks good and the only thing I would have done differently is to rotate the PSU 180°. That moves the AC wiring to the other side so it's not running with all the DC and output lines.

Just checked the thread on HF and I think Dan might indeed be retarded as he got zapped by a Stax plug? First of all, not on anything we or Stax have built. Any idiot knows we put protective measures in place so the risk of a short is non existent. I just love fear mongering like this which has no basis in reality as he's trying to sell the HF idiots onto his stupid idea. So he's going to include adapters anyway to use with the Stax standard and this is somehow makes it easier to source the plug? Yet he is working with some company on a custom plug but they can't make a Stax plug? I mean how stupid is this shit? Also, Stax don't own the plug even if they have used it for 57 years. It is a common design which was widely used back in the day but has only really survived on microphones. Any claims of payments to Stax for the use of "their" plug are just... well fucking stupid. Lastly, he thinks that people will want to use this in a portable setting? Making a portable amp is not easy and well past the know how of most amplifier manufacturers. Any idiot can make something like the King Sound M-03 as it is just opamps feeding transformers. Sounds like shit too... The reality is that most people want to use their portable phones at home. I've certainly received numerous requests to make a home amp for the Shure KSE1500.

Horrible analog stages is just the beginning.

That's always the best way. Naturally using the line out as we don't need to fancy dac's!!

The gain is indeed the real killer here. You can't have super low noise and high gain. Unless you know... magic!!

It would be even better if impregnated with resin to stabilize it. It could have some really impressive specs

I do predict we will see a normally driven HE1 at some point. I've certainly asked for it.. Ohh and I did request a quote for the HE1 system.

This is exactly the point, how hard is it to make a fully Stax compatible electrostatic.... well it's fucking easy. All the required specs are out there and if it is any good (read not Jade or King Sound) it will sell. On the other hand you have the Floats who nobody cares about any more. Seriously, there is no chatter about them at all. As for the amps, well I know for a fact that cheap electrostatic amps is a non starter. People just don't want them, they only want the really expensive stuff. These are also not the basically line level dynamic amps which can be made quite cheaply. There are no cheap high voltage transistors, even in bulk and opamps are only useful for the input of these.