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"Monolith Liquid Platinum Headphone Amplifier by Alex Cavalli"


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it may have been cute when schiit came out with its original batch of cheap shit. all sorts of compromises necessary to produce something for $149

But now we have schiit competing with massdrop competing with monoprice, producing seriously compromised product for prices approaching $700.

All sorts of issues including virtually no class A output power, split rail power supplies, low component life due to some really high chassis temperatures, noisy external switching power supplies and flyback switchers internally. Throw away product for sure.

When you can buy real products from real companies for $500 or less.

 

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The pricing on this is shocking to me. I love monoprice for cheap cables and things. But a 700 dollar amp from them is really confusing. 

Every single $1 cable a have bough from them works perfectly. Who knows maybe they will make something decent. I assume Cavalli is nothing more than a branding exercise, and he is not really involved.  

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yes the amp is balanced. whether there is a opamp unbal to bal converter like the liquid carbon or lcx, is unknown. But there is no reason why the front end cannot be a differential amplifier and then its balanced.

of course that depends on your definition of balanced, its not the same kind of balanced as a super symmetry dynalo. its a unbalanced/balanced to balanced converter and then 4 x cfa output amplifiers. Same as liquid gold, liquid carbon, lcx.

I see the confusion from my post, the single ended output is going to be limited to something like 18vpp (30 volts - VGS(x2)-2) whereas the cth would be about 26v

This amp is definitely to compete with the lyr3. whether they knew that the lyr3 was coming or not. Both amps have serious limitations and issues.

also that picture is the cavalli version the monoprice version will probably be different just like the differences in the original cth and the production version

 

Edited by kevin gilmore
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11 hours ago, purk said:

So the amp isn't balanced?  

This is balanced........

image.png.4ecbfcf4a5f399f70db36751193d7d93.png

Question.....

How do you make a KG electrostatic amp sound like the like of the rubbish out there?

 

Answer....

Install one of these bad boys into your KG designed elctrostatic amps......

 

image.thumb.png.0ce5ac6eb4b0c0844453ef32e43386eb.png

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  • 7 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/6/2018 at 12:26 PM, kevin gilmore said:

it may have been cute when schiit came out with its original batch of cheap shit. all sorts of compromises necessary to produce something for $149

But now we have schiit competing with massdrop competing with monoprice, producing seriously compromised product for prices approaching $700.

All sorts of issues including virtually no class A output power, split rail power supplies, low component life due to some really high chassis temperatures, noisy external switching power supplies and flyback switchers internally. Throw away product for sure.

When you can buy real products from real companies for $500 or less.

 

So the Gilmore Lite was my first "real" amp back in the day, sold it tho. I was thinking of picking the Liquid Platinum up but you seem to hate it. What would you recommend? I am currently using a Schiit Asgard 2.

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