Furutech NCF Clear Line Review (AC Optimizer)

[Somafunk]

Back In Stock!!!! AC Power Supply Optimizer​

The response to our original NCF Clear Line announcement was amazing. We sold out in 24 hours. We now have this sought after unit back in stock.

My alternative version of above….

Still In Stock!!! AC Power Supply Optimizer

The response to our original NCF Clearline announcement was underwhelming. We never sold any, not one, not even any f**king interest, what’s wrong with you folk?, you usually lap this shit up?, bet you’ve been looking at ASR again……. that f**ker!!!!!, He can take his “Oooooo look at me with my fancy doo-dad-dinky test machine“……. and shove it up his f**king arse then attach the f**king probes to his nipples then switch it on, How d’ya like those f**king measurements for size?……..not so f**king clever now, are you…..huh?.

Anyway……..we’ve still got fu**king shitloads of them so get in touch, but please…….no more emails saying “But amir from ASR said…………”, We’re practically suicidal.

Apologies if language was a bit too much, if offended I’ll edit it.

 

[amirm]

They don't say how many they have. Maybe it is my one unit that I returned that everyone is fighting over.

 

[ctbarker32]

Audiophiles will believe anything. I was just reading about Plato's Cave. A good analogy for the world of the Audiophile. On sale for $187.

ADD-POWER

 

[deniall83]

I enjoyed this one. Furutech is such a highly regarded company and they make some wildly expensive products. I often wonder if they know this doesn't do anything and sell it anyway. Or, do they fully believe in the products they sell? Surely the engineers and product designers know..

Perhaps something like this would be better option if you need a product like this https://ifi-audio.com/products/ac-ipurifier/

 

[amirm]

Perhaps something like this would be better option if you need a product like this https://ifi-audio.com/products/ac-ipurifier/

That one does nothing useful for audio either. Someone sent me three of them to test. It gets hot so wastes power but doesn't result in any audio improvement.

 

[deniall83]

That one does nothing useful for audio either. Someone sent me three of them to test. It gets hot so wastes power but doesn't result in any audio improvement.

Good to know!

 

[Descartes]

Massive waist of money!!!

 

[voodooless]

I enjoyed this one. Furutech is such a highly regarded company and they make some wildly expensive products. I often wonder if they know this doesn't do anything and sell it anyway.

They made the product, they (should) have the capability to do the science and find out if it actually works. Clearly they don’t care either way and just rake in the cash. Highly regarded my ass

 

[captainbeefheart]

They openly claim there is no passive components connected to anything.

I suppose their claim is that is stops physical resonance of the receptacle which then may possibly couple to the signal. It's a power cable and carries no signal so I don't see how it's remotely going to do anything even if it does reduce physical resonance.

Amir did great in showing that no matter what it is doing, it has no effect on the performance of the equipment. This leads me to two questions. The first is do we even waste our time with trying to actually measure the physical movement of say the power cable male end inserted into your average power receptacle vs it plugged into the NCF line cleaner. I suppose we would need to rig up some sort of Piezoelectric pickup similar to a knock sensor on an internal combustion engine fitted with OBD-II. I do completely understand that regardless of the results it won't be beneficial to anyone's system unless you are possibly in a perfect Anechoic chamber where background noise is drastically reduced while trying to listen to very low sound pressure through your speakers. Is there a possibility here that a small vibration in the power receptacle could be heard not through the speakers but through air? Similar to large bass notes shaking resonant frequencies of things in the room like heating base boards or whatever. Our band practices in a room where the owner has about 20 guitars hanging on the walls and every once in a while something hits the resonant frequency of an open string and the guitar on the wall starts to become another member in the band. Nobody really notices this crap except me, I wanted to go and clamp something on all the necks of the guitars hanging so it stops doing this, the Jumbo acoustic guitars of his like the are the worst, it's almost always the G string screaming away but we play many songs in the same key for the singer!!

The other question is the advertising claims are quite clear, it says it reduces your gear that you plug in's noise floor. This is easily measurable and it clearly doesn't do anything. It boasts other crazy claims that are easily measurable also. My question is when does it get to the point of "false advertising" and when would any agency step in to do anything about it? I suppose it would take a number of complaints to the BBB in order to get the ball rolling but I have little faith since here in the good ole USA we can't even keep baby formula on the shelves or cheap gas in our tanks. Thank you Brandon!!!

 

[sublemon]

one guy on hoofman's forum actually wrote this (my italics)

"Obviously YOU require x y and or z. But others don't, and it's not YOUR place to keep prodding them to do what they don't want or need to do. Your religion is measurement and scientific scriptural jargon. Address this with Furutech themselves. Or start a thread about BAD manufacturers who won't prove scientifically their products efficacy to your satisfaction. (As far as I know there's no law requiring this, especially not to your satisfaction)."

this is why we are doomed as a species

 

[captainbeefheart]

one guy on hoofman's forum actually wrote this (my italics)

"Obviously YOU require x y and or z. But others don't, and it's not YOUR place to keep prodding them to do what they don't want or need to do. Your religion is measurement and scientific scriptural jargon. Address this with Furutech themselves. Or start a thread about BAD manufacturers who won't prove scientifically their products efficacy to your satisfaction. (As far as I know there's no law requiring this, especially not to your satisfaction)."

this is why we are doomed as a species

Yes this sort of thinking can get quite scary.

I attended a flat earth society local chapter meeting one time to see if I could engage them in any sort of logical way. I only went if I was guaranteed two things, first religion will not be brought up and cannot be a basis for the model. Two, they were open to doing experiments correctly. They showed me their model, and although admitted that their model was incomplete with all sorts of holes I will give them creativity bonus points. Also they were very proud of their model and worked very hard at it so I didn't want things getting nasty quickly. We moved on to experiments. Curvature is the angular turn per unit distance, when trying to measure it in terms of distance only causes trouble even though it sounds simple and is a logical way of doing it. Their "truth" was measuring distance over a body of water and said they were not supposed to see the lights of the city on the other side. I'm sure most of you can see already see some issues here. One is their eye balls are not laid directly on the same plane as the surface of the earth, your eyes are going to be about 68" from the surface. So while they used the defined curvature of the earth given to them they didn't understand how to measure it in a meaningful way against their line of sight. I didn't want to get into refraction of the water so it took quite a long time to show the math explaining the curvature part, a quadratic equation later I lost everyone in the room, they had to reach out to a higher rank official asking to look over the math, supposedly this guy was a student at Boston College. The math was confirmed and some were swayed to understand why the could see the city and acceptance was good. Some were still confused and not exactly on board with the idea. A few were very angry about the situation, they wanted to device another test to do actual measurements so an idiot purchased a very high powered laser. Time went by and we all agreed on the method, it was straight forward and I'm sure you could get what we are doing. Well, wouldn't you know it, when we calculated out a time where we should be able to align the laser with the target the math was spot on. Then when we got below the curvature of the earth you shouldn't see the laser, and of course you couldn't. It was great to hear them on the walkie talkie saying ok bring the laser back up to point B, and it would appear, then they would say ok now down to point A, it would drop below the curve. I went home because after two hours or so they were still playing around with it, scratching their heads trying to come up with an explanation that why this would happen with a flat earth and why it aligns perfectly with the curved earth formula. The argument finally went to religion on social media once we destroyed them on the physical matters so we gave up trying to help them.

It always boils down to some sort of religion and you will never convince these people of anything that disagrees with it.

 

[deniall83]

It's the whole "well I believe it, and that's all that matters" argument. You can't win.

 

[egellings]

Knowledge, when found to be in error, can be edited. Beliefs are read-only.

 

[Eggs Ackley]

Knowledge, when found to be in error, can be edited. Beliefs are read-only.

I'm stealing that.

 

[deniall83]

Furutech NCF Clear Line AC conditioner

Well I'll be darned! I read the below review (see link) and decided to give this a shot. Furutech NCF Clear Line AC Power Line Optimizer Review A...

forums.stevehoffman.tv

This thread on the Steve Hoffman forums is an absolute train wreck. So many people just can't accept that placebo is real. Even when shown the proof. They just say "I believe my ears over graphs and specs". Insanity.

 

[Mart68]

Furutech NCF Clear Line AC conditioner

Well I'll be darned! I read the below review (see link) and decided to give this a shot. Furutech NCF Clear Line AC Power Line Optimizer Review A...

forums.stevehoffman.tv

This thread on the Steve Hoffman forums is an absolute train wreck. So many people just can't accept that placebo is real. Even when shown the proof. They just say "I believe my ears over graphs and specs". Insanity.

desperate stuff isn't it? The bloke on page 38 who intends to buy a second one once he has saved up enough money should bely claims that these things are only bought by wealthy people having fun with their spare cash, and that no harm is being done.

 

[egellings]

Well, if you shoot yourself in the foot, it's your fault.

 

[deniall83]

desperate stuff isn't it? The bloke on page 38 who intends to buy a second one once he has saved up enough money should bely claims that these things are only bought by wealthy people having fun with their spare cash, and that no harm is being done.

It just makes me sad for humanity. I know we're only discussing audio, but this sort of anti-science thinking and complete lack of scientific curiosity transfers to other parts of life as well. I find it super strange that people will accept scientific discovery in all facets of their lives (pharmaceuticals, technology, vehicles, home appliances, computing) and then disregard it as simply another opinion when it doesn't suit them. I also find it strange how easily people trust these companies. Like, they would never make false claims or mislead anyone for the sake of making money. What have they done to deserve such trust and support? People stick up for them like they're family or something. It's just so strange.

I honestly believe that Furutech themselves could come out and say "gotcha! this thing does nothing" and half the people on SH would be like "well I heard a difference so you're wrong Furutech" No amount of evidence would ever be enough.

 

[Mart68]

I honestly believe that Furutech themselves could come out and say "gotcha! this thing does nothing" and half the people on SH would be like "well I heard a difference so you're wrong Furutech" No amount of evidence would ever be enough.

That actually happened with Benchmark when they brought out a new DAC, some people insisted it sounded better than the old one even though Benchmark said it didn't sound any different at all.

In fairness to people though it is hard to accept that there is a placebo effect as it's counter-intuitive.

 

[sjeesjie]

The thread on SHF is still going on strong. I need to cry a little…
They’re so convinced of it working, I almost start to wonder myself: is there something magical going on in this device that actually does something?