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Meet the maker: Regarding the black boxes inside his Oracle conditioner, Jerry says that the two smaller Liquid Air modules clean up the grounds, which often are major sources of back EMF from amplifiers as well as EMI from the environment. The larger Liquid Air module handles the hot and neutrals. The actual functioning of these circuits is somewhat mysterious however. Jerry explains that the large module generates an electrical field that helps trap and neutralize airborne interference and that one achieves best results by placing sensitive components such as DACs directly atop of the Oracle.

In conversation one immediately gets the sense that Jerry, like many in high-end audio, is an independent creative and energetic type who enjoys making things better and better and then better again. He’s clearly possessed of extraordinary persistence and an attention span that crosses decades. Given these impressions my initial assumption was that Jerry probably got his electronics background in the military. This turned out to not be quite correct.

His intention out of school had been just that, to make a career in the armed forces and get his technical training there. However four physicals later it became clear that a nagging asthmatic condition would always be showstopper in the eyes of the recruiters. That was the end of that. Instead Jerry enrolled in a local technical school learning appliance and compressor repair while also working at a stereo store—The Second Sound—where he began to have ideas.

Jerry relates that Tara Labs was one of their biggest cable suppliers. Just as he would finish connecting up his gear with a full complement of their latest and greatest, Matthew Bond would launch something even better. After the third round it was getting expensive and slightly frustrating given the over-the-top playback systems Jerry likes to assemble. Thus began what would turn out to be a very long process of experimentation with home-made cables. These initial prototypes employed hollow ‘capillary tube’ copper conductors such as one might find in compressors but of course used there for a completely different purpose. These early designs evolved into custom annealed hollow oxygen-free copper cables. Jerry was however frustrated by their eventual oxidation of the copper and associated conductivity changes. Mercury is about the only metal that’s liquid at room temperature but if the cable breaks it’s time for the Hazmat team. What else could he use as conductor which was more or less inert and wouldn’t gradually degrade over time?


 
There’s a great future in plastics? So asked Mr. McGuire but it turns out that certain types of high molecular-mass organic polymers (the basis for many plastic materials) are liquid at room temperature and some have excellent conductive properties. Research in this area goes back decades but Jerry’s Liquid Air Clairvoyants are one of the few successful audio applications of the technology.


Of course one major appeal of this type of cable is mechanical simplicity. Just fill up some plastic hose with the goo, insert some silver electrodes (which took a while to figure out), seal everything up and connect top-grade WattGate plugs and receptacles. There aren’t any dielectric chargers, no multiple strands of elaborately counter-woven wires or air tubes.


What could be simpler? As usual it’s simple once you know how. To acquire said know-how took a while. Listening to Jerry wax prolific on the history of his endeavors, the apparent simplicity of the present products resulted from eight years of experimentation involving primarily a long list of failures.


Initially he tried conductive mineral-infused water and other fluids but they were unstable. Often a cable design might sound quite good but the next one assembled would be different by 4dB. He also tried carbon-based conductors which proved hard to drive and the left and right channel often sounded substantially differently.