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...

Being pretty new to this hobby, I relish the opportunity to try new things.  So it was with excitement that I jumped on the chance to have a home audition of the loaner Peak and Volcano.  That I would be able to just pick it up from the house of a local fellow head-fier who would also help split the shipping costs of sending the battleship of a case it travels in was icing on the cake.  Granted, shipping ended up being something like 12 bucks because of where I work, but that’s another story.  Anyway, all good things usually come with some sort of...