Member Reviews: Cavalli Audio Liquid Fire

It seems that it’s a good time to be shopping around for headphone amps, with many wonderful new offerings coming from different manufacturers.   Known until now for DIY designs, Alex Cavalli has entered the commercial fray with the Liquid Fire, a hybrid amp that aims to deliver the musical richness and timbre of tubes with the speed and clarity of a solid state design.   So how does it measure up?  From my listening so far, extremely well.   For the purposes of this review, it replaced the Stacker II hybrid amp (a DIY design from Cavalli) in my chain.  Transport was a Squeezebox Touch which fed either a Rega DAC or Assemblage DAC 2.7.  A quad...

DISCLAIMERS/FINANCIAL INTERESTS   None. Unit was purchased at close to full retail price from a dealer.     PREFACE   I am not a reviewer per se. Many a member on these forums is able to articulate the substance of a device much better than I. I don’t even enjoy testing equipment, taking notes, making sense of it all. All I want is the best sound within my budget, and then move on actually enjoying the music. My target amps were Woo Audio WA22, Red Wine Audio Audez’e Edition, Cavalli Audio Liquid Fire and Leben CS-300XS. Since there weren’t too many direct comparisons between these, I realized the only way for me to put this issue to rest was to get two...