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Furutech NCF Clear Line Review (AC Optimizer)

Rate this product:

  • 1. Waste of money (piggy bank panther)

    Votes: 268 96.4%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 1 0.4%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 2 0.7%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 7 2.5%

  • Total voters
    278

digicidal

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All it'll take is for them to do a 'comparison' where they genuinely believed they heard a difference, yet nothing was actually done, to perhaps awaken to the fact that we and our minds are SO easily fooled and thereby ultimately ripped off by products like this. These people will just mock the likes of 'us' until they experience that.
Nope. In virtually every case - it's the testing methodology that is to blame, or a lack of resolution in the system, or ???. If you can't tell in a DBT... then "trickery" and if you can tell simply by believing it to be so, then "science". :facepalm:

I won't go political, but this argument seems to be ubiquitous in human society... western, eastern, there's no direction you can go that "I believe, so it is" isn't considered a valid argument by a significant majority. It just takes different forms.

On the one hand I find that sad, but on the other - who am I to worry about other people's money, time, votes, souls, etc? If it makes them happy then great for them. I am glad there is a small minority who are interested in testing and validation of any claims. That makes me happy, it's just very hard to find sometimes.

I wish "you do you" was a much more common attitude, but unfortunately it seems to be intrinsic to our nature to try to either save or condemn the opposition - regardless of what the topic is (or what the truth is for that matter). :confused:
 

Mart68

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On the one hand I find that sad, but on the other - who am I to worry about other people's money, time, votes, souls, etc? If it makes them happy then great for them. I am glad there is a small minority who are interested in testing and validation of any claims. That makes me happy, it's just very hard to find sometimes.
This seems to come up on all these tests of 'does nothing' products.

It's not about saving people from themselves it's just about putting the information out there, the decision to be saved from it is up to the individual.

I don't think any of us are 'worrying' about it. But this is our hobby and part of any hobby is the communal aspect, that is helping other hobbyists with advice and support. Part of that is passing on knowledge and experience in the hope that others won't make the same mistakes we did back when there was no internet and all the information available was tainted, at least to some extent.

Some of the EE experts on here seem to think that anyone even considering products like this are idiots and not worth the time but that's not the case. We are mostly talking about intelligent, educated people, but their areas of expertise are a million miles away from audio replay. They rely entirely on other people to tell them what works and what doesn't. If the only advice they ever get is 'Buy this stuff it lifts veils' then that's what they are going to go with.
 

Mart68

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when you read the product page, and you cannot connect the dots.
Then you are a little stupid.
No, you're underestimating how far out of many people's knowledge areas that this is.

What will actually happen is that they will read about the product, either in a review or mentioned on the internet and will 'take a punt' on it based on the recommendations of others. Usually there is a 'Return if not satisfied' offer with these products so it can seem like a 'no brainer.' If they do read the manufacturer's blurb then they will fast-forward through the technical guff anyway, since they have already decided that they don't understand technical stuff and are not going to start learning it now.

Once they have the device there is the need to 'burn it in' thus blurring the line between listening with the device in and out of the system.

Then there is the natural tendency to go with the crowd. After all if you don't hear the differences all these other people do, is it that your system is not good enough? Or your hearing? Are you not an experienced listener? These factors will all encourage a positive placebo response.

Even if they don't the punter will probably not return the device anyway since doing so could be construed by others as an admission that one or all of those factors is true.

The vendors know this and that's why they are not concerned about offering a return and refund policy. Indeed they often point to how few people take advantage of it.
 

Nathan Raymond

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On the one hand I find that sad, but on the other - who am I to worry about other people's money, time, votes, souls, etc? If it makes them happy then great for them. I am glad there is a small minority who are interested in testing and validation of any claims. That makes me happy, it's just very hard to find sometimes.

I wish "you do you" was a much more common attitude, but unfortunately it seems to be intrinsic to our nature to try to either save or condemn the opposition - regardless of what the topic is (or what the truth is for that matter). :confused:
If people only made mistakes in the confines of their own homes and didn't affect anyone else, that'd be one thing (though I'd argue there is a real loss of human potential there if people spend a lot of time/money on snake oil products). The Dunning-Kruger effect is very prevalent in a percentage of people and relatively easy to exploit, and the same lack of clear reasoning that results in people getting suckered by snake oil products is also the same lack of clear reasoning that leads people to believe in "traditional" medicine which has resulted in the near extinction of lots of species (asian elephants, asian tigers, banteng feral cattle, Chinese alligators, grevy's zebras, hawks-bill sea turtles, musk deer, sun bears, rhinoceroses, feral water buffalos, to name some of the high profile ones), homeopathy (based on the crazy "like cure like" where they believe using diluted poisons can be a "cure", and because of ready availability in US drug stores alongside actual medicines has resulted in the deaths of babies due to poor quality control on diluting the poisons), dietary supplements and other multi-level marking schemes that falsly promise people personal transformations (instead ruining many people's lives), everyday people getting involved with QAnon (which can lead to some unwittingly acting on behalf of foreign governments to undermine rational social discourse and well reasoned collective consensus), the list goes on, it's all the same thing underneath, and whatever anyone can do to demystify these things and empower people to have rational agency where they can discern the quality of information they are presented with and understand their own level of expertise is a good thing for the world, so I am really glad that Amir is doing reviews of products like this.
 

Spkrdctr

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I never understand if these reviewers are simply deluded, poor pushovers, or scam artists.
That is easy. Scam artists and liars. There are probably by my guess over 1000 threads on ASR that talk about this very topic. Most on this site see scammers fairly quickly and easily.
 

SimpleTheater

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I want any person that claims it has noisy AC and it "needs" filters to improve the signal show me picture a of their TV or monitor display where the pixel noise is visible DUE to the noisy and distorted AC coming in. And then, if there isn't any noise whatsoever I want them to explain to my why a display isn't prone to AC noise but audio devices are.

And then I sit back and watch their head explode.
You obviously didn't read post #1: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/furutech-ncf-clear-line-ac-conditioner.1108097/

"Does it work? LOL. Yes it does. Not only with audio, but with my video picture as well."
 

SimpleTheater

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You might want to have a look here: https://steinmusic.com/category-room-acoustics/ (embarrasingly this company is like me german). Surf around this site, it´s amazing!
Can you let me know when they release Purple Diamonds. Since the Blue Diamonds "were able to increase the intensity by a factor of three compared to the black diamonds.", I'm hoping they have Purple Diamonds in testing. I'm not a fan of double dipping, so I'll just wait patiently for the latest version.
 

Azathoth

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Omne ignotum pro magnifico
 

bambadoo

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Sorry if it has been posted earlier

Even when using on an apparatus that also does "nothing" it shines.
Screenshot 2022-05-03 at 19.42.08.png


Amazing
 

pseudoid

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As a young-ish design EE, I was a designer for a defense contractor w/existing secure-comm contracts.
When MIL-approved systems/hardware necessitated design changes, we'd be assigned to go in front of our company's 'firing squad' (aka ConfigurationControlBoard - CCB - meetings). Sometimes, such changes included the piece-parts, including even a passive component's (resistor/capacitor/etc.) value changes. But even these small changes may tend to have a big ripple effect across many disciplines; from finance, management, marketing, all the way up-n-down to re-certification (re-qual'n), tech-pubs, repair-depots, spares, and approvals left-n-right, from both seller/buyer sides.
These weekly CCB meetings were quite unbearable at the finger-pointing (blame-games) and time consuming from the engineering perspective as most of them would invariably lead to bickering, amongst impacted disciplines/departments/mgmt.
After about 6 monthly, mandatory weekly attendance, I walked into 2 consecutive CCB meetings and attached a pair of these to my ears:
202205_BullshitDeflectors..jpg
[...2nd order filter @12dB/octave, not high-tech as the Furutech NCF but at $9.99, it is a bargain!]
I never had to attend those @#$% CCB meetings again...:cool:
 

milosz

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But those little coils are made of enameled OFC coated with resonance damping silver color material! Surely that makes the product worth the money!

Actually, I would bet that it might well cost the manufacturer more than you might think to make this thing. It looks like a custom injection molded plastic body they are using, and tooling to make injection molded pieces is not cheap - and that cost is likely not amortized across a huge production run, I mean, how many of these things can they realistically sell? Although if they are using some "stock" part, a part of some previously existing extension cord or other power line product, and just adding pointless coils to it, then the cost-to-produce would be much lower.

By the way, those coils act as ANTENNAE to some degree. I would suggest they let IN more RFI than they send out. I estimate that these coils would be somewhat effective as antennae at about 5 GHz- although due to inductance, this would be rather limited.
 
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jam

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About 15 years ago, I bought a similar filtering device at my city's audio festival. It's also made in Japan by a little known company, Enokido Inc.. The device is called the AC Enacom and is designed to be pluged into the AC wall outlet or an AC power strip. It's supposed to remove high frequency ringing noise according to the included leaflet. It received favorable reviews from some clueless "professional" audio reviewers. I tried it but I never noticed any improvements in sound. If memory serves, I paid about $70 CAD. Amir's review empirically shows that these devices simply don't work unless you need a little snake oil to add some luster to your audio system.
 

pseudoid

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Aim before shooting but not in xenophobian!;)
 
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TheBatsEar

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