Cavalli Audio Liquid Carbon

[kevin gilmore]

I don't believe that Mikhail ever sold it. At the time he said it was about $6k to gold plate it. And I don't believe that, probably more like $1k.

He did try and sell it a couple of times for $35k or so I was told.

 

[G600]

Interesting reading.

If a black thing looks & tastes like shit, how could that be carbon ?

[spritzer]

Well it is Cavalli so it being shit is a given. 

[wink]

... and cavalli means horses, so it's horse moist brown infused with undigested straw.......   

[Ali-Pacha]

Cavalli Audio is now closed 

Ali

Edited October 16, 2017 by Ali-Pacha

[spritzer]

Yup, I thought about doing a RIP Cavalli thread with all the bad shit he's done over the years but didn't find the time.  Even the site now throws up a cert error... 

Must be nice to have a terminally flawed Liquid Carbon with a "lifetime" warranty. 

[nopants]

didn't they just do a group buy on massdrop?

[Torpedo]

didn't they just do a group buy on massdrop?

Yup, I received the offer on an email like 3 weeks ago, maybe a bit more

[spritzer]

Not Cavalli Audio but Massdrop is having these built using Cavalli circuits...well as far as that goes at least. 

[skullguise]

This probably allows them to get out of any support but they still get some royalty $ I'm sure.  All their customers will likely have to send to China to get any repairs done.....

[kevin gilmore]

Cavalli audio page now links to avenson audio for all repairs (and I assume they won't be doing any warranty work)

weren't these people the same ones that came up with the impossibly low thd graphs of the original LLmk1? (confirmed yes)

all the diy schematics on the cavalli page now gone.

I want to know how many investors got hosed, and by how much

also this

https://head-fi.org/threads/cavalli-audio.862917/

 

Edited October 16, 2017 by kevin gilmore

[Pars]

Hmmm... "once I had been able to establish a robust company with excellent products."
Guess that never happened...



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[skullguise]

Lots of 

I feel bad for the consumers who now will have to pay for repairs, especially those "lifetime warranty" amps from first batches.  I have no idea of anything around investors, but yeah: no apparent partners interested in his legacy.

Oh, well, not Singlepower level of fail.  And I wish Alex well with his family.  But many people left a little bit high and dry now

[mypasswordis]

"This is too bad. Loved many of Alex's amps. Liquid Glass, Liquid Crimson, Liquid Lightning 2, EHHA, etc.

I just can't figure why Warren, the CEO, never participated on SBAF to bring exposure to Alex's amps. HF is great and all that for initial exposure in Jude videos, but SBAF owns the high end. Besides many on SBAF, and CS before that, viewed Cavalli gear positively. Still scratching my head on this.

I almost get the sense Warren avoided us to placate his master Jude, to the detriment of Cavalli Audio."

- Marv, 2017

[kevin gilmore]

actually this probably exceeds the singlepower level of failure. Not in the same way, Mikhail walked away with piles of peoples money, but at least for the liquid carbons, one simple mistake with the volume up and plugging in a SE headphone, and the thing blows up. And sometimes it blows up so bad as to burn thru the board, and is now unrepairable. For people outside the usa, by the time you send it in, get it repaired and get it sent back, only for it to blow up again, might as well just throw it in the trashcan. Liquid Fires, now completely unrepairable, i'm sure that Liquid Lightning units are also unrepairable...

The SBAF comment is classic. And SO fucked.

just remember the first 25 or so people paid over $6k for the liquid gold...

Liquid Glass, yep a classic, depending on what tubes you stuffed in there, up to 3 or 4 db of channel imbalance, and no balance control.

And this quote from dBel84 is absolutely amazingly delusional

" He has struggled to keep CA afloat through numerous challenges and was always willing to sacrifice himself in an effort to do what he believed was the right thing to do. This was not an easy decision for him and I can only support him for doing so"

 

Edited October 16, 2017 by kevin gilmore

[TMoney]

39 minutes ago, mypasswordis said:

"This is too bad. Loved many of Alex's amps. Liquid Glass, Liquid Crimson, Liquid Lightning 2, EHHA, etc.

I just can't figure why Warren, the CEO, never participated on SBAF to bring exposure to Alex's amps. HF is great and all that for initial exposure in Jude videos, but SBAF owns the high end. Besides many on SBAF, and CS before that, viewed Cavalli gear positively. Still scratching my head on this.

I almost get the sense Warren avoided us to placate his master Jude, to the detriment of Cavalli Audio."

- Marv, 2017

Also, RIP NoNoNoNoNoNo.

Edited October 16, 2017 by TMoney

[spritzer]

Goes to show how delusional his fanbase/worshippers were.  All of it was great despite what the empirical data said but then again, none of them paid even close to retail for this junk. 

A lot of people were cheated though as he burned through investors money time and time again.  Claiming Alex "sacrificed" is just a load of bollocks. 

[Pars]

Well sure he "sacrificed" Birgir... a lot of people's money.


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[kevin gilmore]

dbel84 once again puts foot in mouth with this gem

"I can also tell you that he will not be publishing any of the production designs for DIY. This is not selfish or mean spirited but rather more of a support issue as the boards are 4 layer and very specifically designed to perform the way they do - anyone trying to lay out a 2 layer board will run into some challenges. I had this conversation with him a long time ago as designs were retired ( Liquid Fire ) , and know that his positioned would be unchanged. Laying out boards was a gift that Alex had, I have yet to see anyone so skilled , it was part of the artist in him."

I think birgir will agree that alex's layouts are among the absolute WORST that we have ever seen. Specifically for the Liquid Fire, LL mk1, LLmk2 and LG, they are all 2 layer boards with 1 oz copper, super thin lands that wander all over the place, and solder pads that are way to small. The left channel does not match the right channel on the Liquid Glass. The liquid carbon is just a terrible layout.

As the stax mafia did in the past publishing every single singlepower design (except for one, never could get a active cable driver) I assume its our job to now publish both schematics and diy boards for every single cavalli product

 

 

[gepardcv]

3 hours ago, spritzer said:

A lot of people were cheated though as he burned through investors money time and time again.

Got any more details on that?

2 minutes ago, kevin gilmore said:

As the stax mafia did in the past publishing every single singlepower design (except for one, never could get a active cable driver) I assume its our job to now publish both schematics and diy boards for every single cavalli product

Based on the LL teardown, I concluded that, while the build quality left much to be desired, so did the circuit. I then heard a LL2T at a meet, and while it worked fine with a 009, it sounded ghastly with a 007 (or maybe that 007 was broken — the sound was dull to the point that it made Audeze headphones seem bright and lively in comparison). Are these other amps really worth the effort of reverse-engineering and building?

[kevin gilmore]

no of course the effort is not worth it. But we will do it anyway.

I have schematics for the liquid fire, liquid lightning mk1 and mk2, liquid carbon, and liquid gold. And from some really good pictures of the massdrop cth, got most of the schematic for that. Did release a liquid gold mini board a while back, just put 4 on a heatsink and add power supply. In fact you can replace the mosfets with bipolar for something that performs much better.

the mosfets on the liquid lightning had capacitance so high that they took more power to drive than the power they delivered to the headphones.

cavalli's motto is take a well known working circuit and replace as much of it as possible with mosfets, because its moar better.

someone we all know well has ordered both massdrop amplifiers. unless massdrop figures out how to prevent the liquid carbon from blowing up, the repairs will eat them alive.

[spritzer]

31 minutes ago, gepardcv said:

Got any more details on that?

Based on the LL teardown, I concluded that, while the build quality left much to be desired, so did the circuit. I then heard a LL2T at a meet, and while it worked fine with a 009, it sounded ghastly with a 007 (or maybe that 007 was broken — the sound was dull to the point that it made Audeze headphones seem bright and lively in comparison). Are these other amps really worth the effort of reverse-engineering and building?

At least three people stepped in as CEO's or sales managers of Cavalli over the years and I heard they all paid a huge investment for those positions.  That was really the issue with Cavalli aside from amps needing a lot of servicing and not being made to be serviced, too many fingers in the pot.  

I spent a lot of time working on the LLMk1 and ended up completely rebuilding it.  New PSU, new output stage, new input stage, new gain stage and even a new transformer.  I lost a pile of money on it too but I knew that going in.  We do this because shitty products should be exposed. 

I was at the local Senn dealer today to setup my HE-1 audition (tried to get them to bring it to my place but no dice ) but while there they were asking my advice on some amp designs and one of the guys said "you are always so negative about the designs!!".  I said "true but that's because for every Headamp amp that is built properly you have dozens of posers who don't have a clue what they are doing.  If they were charging 250$ then who cares but 10K$ for the Goldmund pile of fail is just too much to take." 

That's pretty much what sums it up for me, nothing has changed from 2005 when nobody wanted to discuss the amps in detail.  It was all about the beautiful, beautiful music and any dissent to that was crushed.  This is a wider subject for me though as people are willing to swallow just about anything, regardless of how stupid it is.  Just see something like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" or classics like Solar roadways...  Stupid and bad shit needs to be called out. 

[DefQon]

8 hours ago, mypasswordis said:

"This is too bad. Loved many of Alex's amps. Liquid Glass, Liquid Crimson, Liquid Lightning 2, EHHA, etc.

 Besides many on SBAF, and CS before that, viewed Cavalli gear positively. Still scratching my head on this.

- Marv, 2017

To be fair, the only reason why any of the Cavalli gear was viewed positively back in the day on HF was because there were only a handful of people shilling the fuck out of the CA pre-release LF and LL prototypes and before Jude's production unit reviews. I remember this clearly as it was around the LCD2 rev1/early rev 2 time and how many people got locked out of the related threads for apparently threadcrapping, myself included.

NoNoNoNoNoNo, icenine and few others were hyping the fuck out of the original Liquid Fire and the hype went there onwards, muppetface had her own little thread where she and dbel wrote stories about how wonderful the LL and LG was going to be before a full production unit was even released. It wasn't until people started having issues with the original LF and LL mk1 units, Birgirs LL thread here and Macedonian's KGSSHV vs LL review on HF that people started realizing the shit Cavalli was doing, oh and the massive price drops with mk2 releases shortafter rendering the first amp iterations worth fuck all in terms of value.

I saw this shit coming with CA being the next to close down after RSA, once the hype dies down, all the shit will be laid out for people to see wtf is really going on with these amps. 

Edited October 17, 2017 by DefQon

[penmarker]

8 hours ago, mypasswordis said:

"This is too bad. Loved many of Alex's amps. Liquid Glass, Liquid Crimson, Liquid Lightning 2, EHHA, etc.

I just can't figure why Warren, the CEO, never participated on SBAF to bring exposure to Alex's amps. HF is great and all that for initial exposure in Jude videos, but SBAF owns the high end. Besides many on SBAF, and CS before that, viewed Cavalli gear positively. Still scratching my head on this.

I almost get the sense Warren avoided us to placate his master Jude, to the detriment of Cavalli Audio."

- Marv, 2017

He can't, because they've already established relations with HF. HF hates SBAF to the core. You can't even link to SBAF in HF threads. I did it once and I got a pm by a mod saying I can't do some things. Imagine hating another forum which has I think less than a quarter for your traffic, and then seeing your good friend go there to market his products. HF is gonna do a temper tantrum.

They salty as fuck.

[mypasswordis]

Sucks that dshill84 and shillchu were once part of the OG ortho crew along with wualta, bjarne, jadeeast, ericj, Faust, me, etc. I feel mildly guilty by association. Shillchu was already flipping orthos back then, come to think of it.