kevin gilmore

That was a jpg picture, the schematic above is the latest

that is the correct schematic with q27 and q28 replaced with surface mount on the back of the board

lg.zip note: phase splitter not included you need 4 for balanced

so after thinking about it a while, something is wrong with the hv delay circuit which turned on with the tubes cold. this has to be fixed first. when the tubes are cold, the output voltage is going to go to +500v, and thru the 100k feedback resistor is going to put 500v on the cathode of the input tube. With the filament of the input tube grounded, there is 500v cathode to filament. Guaranteed to cause a light show and permanently trash the input tubes.

I always bring up the low voltage power supplies first. and turn them off last

it would be nice to come up with some universal layout that would take all the available options that340, 4 x single jfet,2 x dual jfet,2 x dual bipolar... yes pars posted the picture I was thinking of, I even found the board

I did post a picture quite a while ago of the 4 jfets soldered to a milmax socket. definitely the easy way finding the picture might be harder

that definitely does suck, I had one noisy one out of a batch of 10. birgir is making a little mini board, and Justin bought a pile of dual transistors, might be a better solution the layout of the amp is such that you can replace the that340 with jfets if you can get them

you either add a unbalanced/balanced to balanced input stage which adds lots of parts and space, or supersymmetry which forces a low input impedance. so let me explain further, lets say you have an amp with a gain of 5 now you put 1v on both the + and - xlr inputs. Output voltages are +5 for both. Difference is zero, but if you have unbalanced headphones, then 5v on the headphones which is bad now you do the same thing to a true differential amplifier. Output voltage is now 0 for both channels which is why a true balanced amp removes any common mode voltages and noise this does not help you with a single ended input. or a single ended input converted to balanced. In the first case there is 5v on the SE output. In the second case the + output has +5v and the - output has -5v

no that is not correct. Its 4 single ended amplifier channels. No input dc rejection. Its a balanced amplifier, but not differential. its wired different than the liquid gold in that a single ended input results in a single ended output.

this one has a 5 volt 50 ohm output, so yes. sorry don't have a spare, a lot of the ones on ebay are used and the lightbulb has a fixed lifetime, have been searching for a new one for a while

so I bought a bunch of different 10mhz master reference oscillators to see if there was any difference. and yes there is a big difference, this is my favorite. a rubidium disciplined ocxo

a true balanced differential amplifier will have significant common mode rejection. For example there are a few well known diy dacs that have a bit of dc on their output. a differential amplifier will subtract the dc from the inputs and the output will be free of dc with respect to ground. a balanced amplifier made from 4 x unbalanced input amplifiers will have significant dc on the output. For headphones wired as balanced, no problem. For headphones wired as single ended, could be a big problem. supersymmetry dynalo and dynahi are true balanced differential amplifiers. So is the RSA darkstar (although it still sounds like shit) schiit joutenheim is a balanced differential amplifier (actually its an instrumentation amplifier) but has significant differential gain when used with a single ended input. liquid gold, liquid carbon, gsx are not balanced differential amplifiers. The first two have phase splitters to fix the problem. the gsx is balanced out only when you have a balanced input signal.

for this design the inputs need to be 600v parts. so no jfets. it would need to be cascaded inputs, and change in the input bias to get that to work

I will look to see what I have, but the original output transistors are also obsolete would be easy to take ssdynalo board and throw half the parts away

6c33 output tube for the win

fairly low input impedance though, use 10k pot its remarkably simple and effective

Looks like significant price reductions on what is probably NOS. Nothing new from ray in a few years. also I really like this one, complete lie from day one. The amp is not differential. Its 4 x single ended amps same as liquid carbon. no common mode rejection... and one of the worst phase splitters ever

offset currents in the opamp, no opamp is perfect. If it likes to be at -4 leave it alone.

I do like dbel84's comment that the cavalli amps will be worth more now that production has ceased. Anyone know any RSA or singlepower amps that are worth more now than when they were new? the liquid spark as far as I can tell is just another version of the ehha amp. with a switching power supply. the liquid tungsten is a poorly done futterman with proprietary tubes and again a switching power supply. Being a thought leader definitely took up a lot of his time.

At low volume levels it will be hard to notice. But as the volume increases the frequency response will change

That is definitely one way to tune it

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.

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

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"