Will recommended this for my SDFB setup and it arrived yesterday. I know there are more elegant and much more expensive options. After searching a bit I decided $40 is worth just the chassis alone, other empty chassis were double that so I went for it. I've been dying to see what's under the cover. This has been a life long thing with me, I NEED to know what's inside. so here we go...





Yes, that's a thin sheet of cardboard in there.





I have a few thoughts about this box, curious what others think, leave it alone or upgrades?

The plan for this is to have a SDFB and piggy between this and the wall. Then UFO, CSP, ZP# into this box.

The outlets look like they have good copper connections... have to check the sound, but I think I recall this one may have claimed to be real red copper that is plated for the receptacle plugs, and many inexpensive Chinese made receptacles do use decent copper it seems. What about the IEC inlet... Furutech copy or plain nickel plate??? Looks like it is probably plate, but if gold plated, guessing it might use some decent copper under too. The heavy Aluminum case is your friend for shielding. And are those silver plate wires? If silver plate (even if perhaps small, short runs of good wire can sound pretty good), I would try it as is for sure, especially if the IEC appears to be optimized. If not, I would start with a nicer IEC, like Viborg Furutech copy or similar. But I am usually a one-thing-at-a-time guy, wanting to hear what things do before making changes.

I like to do "home run" wires on these things... three good wires to each receptacle...

Only took me four months to get around to this. I pulled all that silver wire out and replaced it with some leftover 12-3 romex. If anyone else ever buys one of these, first thing to do is get rid of that tiny wiring. The results are not subtle, it seems the original wiring was limiting power and choking things. After changing the wires my first impression was everything is "louder" than it was before. After listening awhile, it's not necessarily louder, but more open/dynamic with added authority on the bottom end.

I'm planning to change out the IEC connection, I'd rather have the wires clamped down over soldering them. I may also entertain changing the outlets out, there seems to be a lot of brass in them...the adventure never ends!

Some reasons I suggested that particular wire is it has more strands than some others, and so, guessing a little more silver by proportion, and perhaps a tighter twist/pack maybe more like Decware Styx? But also, 30 ft of wire would leave enough to try a power cable or two out of it if you wanted.

The reason I thought leaving the stock wires in your box for a bit might be good if silver, was it might have been useful to get a point of reference to compare changes to. But also, based on the SDFBs opening up and working better here with a little smaller cables than I liked with fuses... though your box wires seem a lot smaller, they are also short, and I wondered if they could possibly work with the SDFBs... glad you found better sound with 12 gauge romex.

I went on a little ramble trying a bunch of Chinese made AC cable ends, something I have been meaning to do for years in my case, so compared to me, you did well... only 4 months!

Thinking about that silver plate/teflon wire I linked, if interested, I am thinking it could a cool experiment to make a few power cables with different twists, braids, and/or wraps. I so far have liked making cables of multiple, and somewhat various strands, making up the total gauge of each leg with several wires rather than one. And my fav for a while has been to split the ground wires in half, and wrap (or sort of braid) them around the line and neutral runs individually, the grounds meeting back up at the plugs. But in this case, with all bigger 12 gauge wires,  I wonder what it might sound like with the line and neutral twisted, and a longer ground wrapped around the whole, maybe every 3-4 inches, or maybe 6, or maybe more.... the ground running across the twisted wires for better noise cancelation??? Or like so many do, braid all three, but I would try different tightnesses of braids and see what sonic differences that makes. In my experience finding the right geometry is big!

Here, my latest cable ramble was about testing different cables gauges, geometry, and ends, trying to "find" a more ultimate "piggy" for my needs... looking to speed up and clarify the too intense density/darkening/slowing shifts I got from the SDFBs and Mark's "piggies" compared to fuses.

Making a lot of them, and Mark wanting to hear what I was talking about, I was going to send him some variations of the different iterations. But I liked the wire configurations I came up with at first so much, that I just tested different ends on the same basic cables. The sound differences were quite notable with a few Rhodium, a few coppers, several gold plated, and several silver plated... And to me, the best, not always, but generally, share that more light weight "generic" vibe that might be similar to how your orange receptacles feel to you.

Similar with my tests a long time ago for main audio outlets.... with good quality metals in all the outlets, they included some pretty nice cryo'd Oyaide and Furutch and more, but the Mapleshade, (maybe NOS receptacles???) simple copper and light duty, was the most transparent and resolving here... not as hifi beefy and colored as the others, but better at more complete revelation of all the nuanced and fine stuff in space, with really good micro speed, and a little lighter sounding, but good enough balances to work from. To me, this was the best reference baseline all things considered, and that has held up with occasional comparisons over years.

Similar happened with this experiment with AC cable ends... Not always, and they all sounded really good relatively speaking, but I tended to prefer old-school light Neotechs I had, and the light plastic ones in this Chinese experiment, without heavy metal casings... presumably, the latter comparatively a little overly damped to me. I could use any of them, and do, but it was an intersting exploration.

So I was going to send Mark the same basic cables, with several different ends, but I finally decided just to send the stock one he sent with the SDFBs that I had modified to sound faster and more complex here, and one I made with my favorite sounding ends in my setup. As it turned out, these were the lowest priced ends I tried, and here, with my small strand runs of mil-spec silver plated copper combined for total gauge, these Red Copper ends really complimented the cable's geometry and setup beautifully... To me, they sound similar to Mark's HPCopper sluggos, rich and complex with a nice copper shimmer, but these ends (on these cables) were faster, and show all that good stuff with more space, a little less dense fullness, while still feeling a little warm and nicely balanced. Very revealing without hardness here as I recall (Mark still testing them, so I can't check). I look forward to seeing how what I heard translates to his system when he gets time to let me know.

Anyway, if interested, here are the ends I am talking about.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806176142498.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.pcDetailTo...

Sounds good. I just have not liked romex wire the few times I tried it in the audio chain... I found it difficult to use as you did, but more, the wire I tried was lacking in revelation and speed... a little slow and dull, and figured this wire would very likely do what the romex did and more. That said, the Romex clearly brought your system up some notches into a big beauty, so all great there. Who knows, maybe you got a batch with particularly good copper.

Or, it also could be the extra power push has helped bring out the orange outlets. In China, apparently orange is not necessarily like our "hospital grade" outlets, that tend to be better than standard, but not a whole lot in my experience for sound anyway. I got a clear Chinese made receptacle some years ago claimed to have red copper innards, which had a choice of orange or clear. I got the clear making it clear what is inside... looking mostly like copper as claimed... and it sounded notably better to me than the PSAudio receptacle it replaced in my P5 Regenerator.... Used as the high power receptacle, and having my amp and preamp plugged into it for many years now, the revelation and speed are really good... Like I don't really hear the outlet... just less there. Even before burnin, I could hear right away the improvement over PSAudio's proprietary "audiophile" outlets. I have a number of supposedly better ones too, Furutech copies, and have them in use, also sounding quite good here. I should do a direct comparison, but both types sound really good to me, enough that I have not been inspired to compare, the more difficult to pull very fine information critical to me being there, which is telling.

Yours may be different, but who knows, the Chinese audio market is able to use better metals and parts inexpensively, and seems to do a lot of that. So I would not necessarily discount them out of hand because they are "Chinese" and "cheap." Now your IEC, that is likely another matter, upgrading to copper, or gold or Rhodium plate on copper in a decently made IEC probably a notable shift, though guessing not as much as the bigger wires did.

Awesome how you are describing your "new" experience!

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I use this for speaker wire myself - very nice! It is the 12 awg version of the 8 awg that Decware uses for the Zstyx speaker cable.

I use the 12 awg, because the 8 awg is so darned stiff, and hard to work with.