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The Audio Magic company and its Oracle power conditioner and Clairvoyant Liquid Air cables are perhaps less widely known but products with such audacious names and a reasonable promise of being effective certainly deserve a look and listen!


Totally transparent: Clearly the Oracle is in a class of its own with respect to industrial design and aesthetics. Rather than the usual boring brushed aluminum the Oracle case is put together from several slabs of ½"/12mm clear acrylic plastic. And they used to be even thicker. The present arrangement shaves off about 40 pounds from the total weight, definitely a good idea. Even with the ½" plates the case is completely rigid and there’s nothing to corrode, an important issue here in the Hawaiian tropics.

Apart from such practical considerations the main benefit of all that acrylic is being able to gawk at the Oracle’s rather interesting innards. With this product there’s little doubt about what your $8.500 purchased. It’s all completely visible each time you look. Across the back there’s naturally an array of cryogenically treated WattGate 381Ag silver-contact power receptacles. Each of these retails for a tidy $150 and the Oracle has 12 of ‘em. Inside each the plug clamps are brass with what appears to be a rather substantial layer of silver plate. Beneath the silver are intermediate layers of oxygen-free copper and nickel. This arrangement seems perhaps rather elaborate but as many of us have learned from trial and error over the years, these metal-to-metal interfaces between conductors and connectors can have a significant audible effect, usually deleterious. It can all be over in the first few inches.


The nickel plating prevents the copper from eventually working its way through the silver, which results in considerable degradation of conductance. Quite a few power cords in my spares bin show exactly this problem so it’s a real consideration. Mechanically the jacks grip rather firmly but without requiring undue force when inserting or removing the plugs.

As is typical the power outlets are divided into functional groups. There are four outlets for amps, four for digital gear and the remaining four are for low-level analogue components such as preamplifiers and phono stages. Across the digital outlets gleaming gold pure copper foil-in-oil hand-made Jensen electrolytic caps with silver leads (about $40 each from Denmark) help prevent digital hash from entering or exiting the Oracle. Sonicaps from the metropolis of Hot Springs/AR at $69 a throw bypass the amp, low-level outlets and two AC inlets. Silver wiring connects up all the grounds and my Oracle came equipped with the Liquid Cable option. This  upgrades the standard internal silver wiring to Audio Magic’s exclusive liquid polymer cabling.

Somewhat unusually the Oracle requires two power cables to the mains wall outlet, each protected by a 20-amp circuit breaker. One result of this is that one will probably never exceed the unit’s power delivery limits.


What’s going on inside the box? Through the acrylic case one can readily observe three black boxes and one 12V transformer. There are two smaller black boxes and a much larger one all emblazoned with diffractive labels stating simply Liquid Air Module. The hot and neutrals from the two power inlets disappear via liquid polymer cabling into the large sealed Liquid Air Module which on its front has a small blue power-on indicator. Coming back out is another set of liquid polymer cables that deliver power to the outlets. Outlet and AC inlet grounds all disappear into the two smaller Liquid Air Modules - one inlet and the digital grounds go to one; the other inlet with amp and low-level grounds go to the second.


While the wiring topology is straightforward enough, what exactly do these modules do? For the answer to these as well as many of life’s other enduring questions one needs to talk directly to the inventor of the Oracle and Liquid Air cabling, Jerry Ramsey of Aurora/CO.