Tice Power Conductor 2 Vintage AC Cable Review

[AudioSceptic]

Back in the early 70's I had a little Stereo, Kenwood integrated amp and Jensen Speakers. Hooked up with zip cord. Was looking to upgrade my speakers, the salesman offered to let me try a Cobra Cable, Hooked it up and my amp started to oscillate. Definitely heard a difference. Turned the amp off before it blew up and returned the cables high capacitance caused problems but the cables looked pretty.

Yes, there *are* cables that can make a difference, but only if they measure sufficiently differently (capacitance, inductance, resistance), to alter the response when combined with the amp and speaker and, in extreme cases they can provoke instability.

 

[Azathoth]

Omne ignotum pro magnifico

 

[voodooless]

My question is why does he continue to test them ? It is waste of time, effort and server space so what is the point ?

Just the knowledge that on some audiophile forum somebody will have a major meltdown over these reviews is already reason enough.

Some people will makes fools out of themselves over this, and Google will make that foolery be found. It will lead to more people coming to ASR to see what’s going on, and if even a few of those people finally get suspicious about these products, that’s already a major win!

Let the ASR virus spread.. slowly, but surely!

 

[Mnyb]

Just the knowledge that on some audiophile forum somebody will have a major meltdown over these reviews is already reason enough.

Some people will makes fools out of themselves over this, and Google will make that foolery be found. It will lead to more people coming to ASR to see what’s going on, and if even a few of those people finally get suspicious about these products, that’s already a major win!

Let the ASR virus spread.. slowly, but surely!

+1 ASR comes quite high in the search ranking nowadays , so if someone search Tice , there it is !

 

[Dougey_Jones]

So, the past two Tice reviews just confirmed what many already believed, that Tice was a scam artist from Jupiter, Florida.

Case closed.

 

[Nicky991]

So Amirm has tested a lot cables and "conditioners" and we know that they do not work and are sold to "audiophiles" who usually have more money then brains.
My question is why does he continue to test them ? It is waste of time, effort and server space so what is the point ? Seems to me this is just a low hanging fruit in order to have something, anything really new to post on the first page.

Amir is the Chief Fun Officer and doing these reviews is likely a lot of fun. No mystery here.

 

[Robbo99999]

This is worse than the other one, at least the other one was funny! (The product I mean).

 

[fpitas]

Yeah, except that's not why he's doing it.
Tice was completely discredited many years ago.
This kind of "review" is primarily a 'hook' to generate clicks and traffic to the ASR website.

I think reviews of more recent audiophile garbage are far more likely to get clicks.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

This is gold. Amir is taking us back in history, and we are witnessing the birth of an industry: The Audio Grift industry. And we get to see these brilliant designers: Guys who used to wire up portable hair dryers no doubt, and market hair care products to drug stores, finding a way to amass their vast personal fortunes by convincing us audiophiles we could have clean, shiny, and lustrous AC power.

It's inspiriring, really it is. Somebody ought to do a documentary.

 

[fpitas]

This is gold. Amir is taking us back in history, and we are witnessing the birth of an industry: The Audio Grift industry. And we get to see these brillian designers: Guys who used to wire up portable hair dryers no doubt, and market hair care products, finding a way to amass their vast personal fortunes by convincing us we could have clean, shiny, and lustrous AC power.

It's inspiriring, really it is. Somebody ought to do a documentary.

Flim-flam artists everywhere are getting nostalgic!

 

[Svet Angelov]

Well, there are some of us here that witnessed the grift birth while it was happening. It's even more boring the second time around.
You guys love it.....I think it's just a waste of ASR's bandwidth and Amir's skills.

I kind of get where you're coming from but I also believe that if even one person is deterred from buying garbage, that makes a review worth it. Not everything is hunky dory in audioland and every bit of exposure to the truth helps, imo

 

[fpitas]

Well, I've got news for you. The snake oil problems in audioland are not going to be solved by ASR.
It's far too entrenched. It's disappointing, but it is what it is.

That may be short-sighted. ASR has already done a lot to raise awareness and educate those who want it.

 

[sealman]

This may be a first, no one has voted great... yet.

View attachment 304868


JSmith

And were off to the troll races!

 

[fpitas]

And were off to the troll races!
View attachment 304901

You see, Amir didn't break it in at all. Some perspicacious listener realizes its potential.

 

[xray]

I think Tice missed an opportunity to maximize the woo-woo and price by not using dials instead of just on-off switches. Imagine the hours of fun one could have adjusting the dials to get that sound just right.

 

[Spocko]

This is a review, teardown and measurements of the Tice Power Conductor 2 vintage AC power cable. It is on kind loan form a member (cost unknown):
View attachment 304841

While the terminations are beefy, no self-respecting high-end audiophile would want to be near a cable looking like it was left over from Radio Shack store of 1970s! There is scant information on this cable. The bit that is there is in used market and states exactly the following on the function of the switches:

View attachment 304842

Makes perfect sense, no? Well, let's take the box apart:
View attachment 304843

Nothing in there but the switch. It seems at first glance that the neutral white wire is being disconnected in one orientation of the switch. This made no sense as you can't power the device that way. Meter confirmed that the connection remained even when the switch is in disconnect mode! So I took the ends off and it was then that I realized there were 5 conductors, not 3 in the cable. We have the standard Line, Neutral and Ground in thick gauge. The white neutral is hiding under the black and green and yo only see it if you look sideways. The three wires go from one end to the other so switches do not impact those at all.

The thinner white and black wires simply mirror their corresponding thicker conductors. Put another way, if you close the switch on neutral, you just get an additional thinner wire terminating at the same two ends. Ditto for black. This simply changes the resistance of the cable ever so slightly so no way it can have the impacts the company claims.

I was tempted to stop here as there is not even a remote chance of this having an effect but thought we should measure so here we are.

Tice Power Conductor 2 Measurements
I started by powering my Topping D70s using a standard AC cable. Here is its output, the thing we eventually listen to:
View attachment 304844

Here is the response when the Tice cable is used to power the DAC with either switch variations:
View attachment 304845

There is a tiny performance degradation but I think that is just run to run variation.

Let's measure frequency response as that is where we see the impact on bass and treble:
View attachment 304846
All three curves land so accurately on top of each other that it leaves no room for any variation. Not a thing is changed in the tonality of the DAC.

Conclusions
It is fascinating to see the nature of such tweaks years ago, vs the sophistication today. We have a box with just two parallel wires being taken in an out. Today they don't make it so obvious with talk of nano particles, EMI, etc. My sense is that whoever put this together had no engineering experience and just imagined such an implementation would change the sound. Anyway, there is nothing here to even lend imagination to make the sound different let alone be tube like and such.

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I'm now tempted to send @amirm a metal coat hanger to test

 

[fpitas]

I think Tice missed an opportunity to maximize the woo-woo and price by not using dials instead of just on-off switches. Imagine the hours of fun one could have adjusting the dials to get that sound just right.

Back then, people might have bridled. As time went on they got inured to believe any old sh*t and pay a fortune.

 

[sealman]

I'm now tempted to send @amirm a metal coat hanger to test

There have been several coat hangar tests done in the past.

 

[fpitas]

Nah, it's just realistic, and based on many years of observing the industry.
Get back to me in about ten years and outline the profound effect ASR has had on the snake oil end of this business.

I'm an engineer, so I never had the audiophile itch, but a lot of posters here can tell you that ASR helped them kick the snake oil addiction

 

[voodooless]

Get back to me in about ten years and outline the profound effect ASR has had on the snake oil end of this business.

Judging by the direct attacks at ASR, the community or @amirm that these snake oil companies perform in ever increasing frequency, we don’t have to wait another decade.