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While still experimenting with his concept, Fritz talked about it with his friend Hans Kortenbach known for his Musical Affairs loudspeakers. Hans is a real wood master craftsman with his speaker cabinets and proposed to take the concept a step further. Build a power distributor based on Fritz’ shielding endeavors. By using Hans’ favorite wood material it would add shielding capacities beyond the EM field. Wood is a fine vibration damper, immune to static and has low-frequency absorption qualities. Hans constructed a wooden box with one Furutech IEC at the end of a 9cm long embedded copper tube and six equally sleeved Furutech receptacles on top. Each tube connects to earth ground. With six sleeved outlets, the name Sixpack was a no-brainer.
The copper chimneys accommodate all standard round wall plugs up to a diameter of 49mm. This covers most available power cables on the aftermarket excluding really exotic fare like PS Audio’s AC 10 or 12. For review we could choose from power cables by Crystal Cable, Harmonic Technology, Nanotec, ASI, PS Audio and Virtual Dynamics.
Upon installing the Sixpack a main point of caution became evident immediately. With the long tubes any power cord's plug is by design fully engulfed by the Sixpack. Depending on plug length it sits from 1 to more centimeters below the top of the power distributor. This means that when it comes times to unplug the cable you’re a yanker. The tolerance between plug and copper tube means that no normal person can put one let alone two fingers inside the tube to grab the plug. One is thus forced to pull out the plug by pulling on the cable itself hoping its strain relief will protect it. High-quality after market AC plugs of course are designed for a virtual death grip to improve signal transfer. Some require real brute force to get seated, then remain stuck there as though glued (all good for mechanical integrity). To get ‘em back out requires equal force or strategic lateral torque by rocking them back and force in the outlet while pulling. When you’re dealing with 230V you don’t really want to get messy. Here the concealed concept becomes quite impractical.
The whole concept behind the construction of the Sixpack of course requires that the box be connected to a grounded wall outlet. Next and just as important the Sixpack only adds value when used with shielded power cords. There’s still a huge debate on whether shielding of power cords is desirable for home audio. In certain cases shielding has been shown to choke dynamics from added capacitance.
To avoid this the shield should be well spaced from the signal conductors which entails a large diameter power cable. Exceptions apart most aftermarket power cords are shielded and will hence in theory benefit from the Sixpack’s additional sleeve shields.
