December 13, 2020Audio Product Reviews

Drop x Alex Cavalli Liquid Carbon X Amp Reviews Compendium

Compendium updated by February 18th, 2021

The Drop x Cavalli Liquid Carbon X is a solid-state balanced headphone amp that's designed to provide an objective "wire with gain" sound.

We’ve compiled reviews from across the web for your reference. What you’ll find here are the TLDR versions of the full reviews (which you can access with the provided links). We’ll continue updating this compendium as reviews come in. 

 

From Z Reviews' review of the Drop x Alex Cavalli Liquid Carbon X Amp, first published on June 15th, 2019:

 

From Audio Science Reviews' review of the Drop x Alex Cavalli Liquid Carbon X Amp, first published on October 23rd, 2018:

The Massdrop Cavalli Liquid nails the industrial design and branding. The marketing department gets an A+ here. Alas, from engineering point of view, this is an average effort. Power levels are modest as desktop products go...

Subjectively, the Liquid Carbon X simply does not have enough clean power for my taste. The purpose of such a large desktop units should be to have ample amount of power to throw any headphone at it. That simply is not the case in single-ended mode. The amplifier distorts before the headphone which is no good...

In summary, whatever magic people assume behind this branded product escapes me, both in engineering and subjectively. Nothing is badly broken but there simply is not enough "oomph" to make it for me. So I can't recommend it.

 

From Joshua Valour's review of the Drop x Alex Cavalli Liquid Carbon X Amp, first published on October 29th, 2019:

 

Editor’s note: Emphases ours.