We Opened a $40 Frequency Box. Here Is What Was Inside.

The listing promised the same frequencies as devices costing five times more. A screwdriver and an afternoon told a different story.

Advertisement. This publication is owned by Bexxly, the maker of the Sequence Pro. Read our disclosure.

The box arrived in a plain mailer with no brand name on it, a printed leaflet, and a single button. The leaflet explained how to turn it on. It did not explain what came out.

That question is the whole reason this article exists. Frequency devices are sold on a number, and the number is easy to print on a label. Whether the device actually produces it, how cleanly, and for how long before a person has to intervene, is where the forty-dollar unit and the two-hundred-dollar unit part ways. So we did the obvious thing and took the cheap one apart.

Four screws, one coil, one chip

Four screws later, the answer was on the bench. A green circuit board, a chip, and a coil wound in tin-finish wire, the same metal used for food cans. Tin is cheap, it solders easily, and it oxidises over time, so the signal passing through it degrades as the coil ages. The chip does the rest of the work by switching the signal on and off, which is the cheapest way to make a frequency and the reason the output is a square wave rather than a curve.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A square wave at 528 hertz is a stack of frequencies pretending to be one: the number on the label plus every odd multiple of it, riding on top, none of which the buyer chose. A sine wave is one frequency and nothing else. On an oscilloscope the difference is a row of corners against a single smooth line.

The coil is tin. Tin is what they make cans out of.

Who does the work at 2am

The other difference has nothing to do with electronics. It's about who presses the button. The $40 box plays one frequency until a person presses it again. A night with a ten-frequency program is nine presses, each one made by someone awake in the dark, which means the box is, in practice, a device with one moving part, and the moving part is you.

The Sequence Pro loads up to ten frequencies once, moves through them on its own, and switches itself off when the timer ends. Two rotary dials set the program and the timer by feel, which was the single most requested change from owners of the company's first device, who had spent a year telling it the old keypad was invisible in the dark.

What's inside the other one

The Sequence Pro's coil is plated in 24-karat gold, chosen for the same reason the connectors on a phone are gold: it conducts without corroding, so the frequency on the display is the frequency that leaves the coil. The output is a pure analogue sine wave, exact to the number on the display, from 0.01 to 500,000 hertz. There are four outputs where the box has one, two power inputs so a failed cable doesn't end the night, and a printed 200-frequency handbook in the box, because "which one do I run" was the second most common question the company received.

The honest verdict

The $40 box does what it costs. It makes a frequency, roughly, for as long as someone is awake to tell it which one. If you want to find out whether a frequency device belongs in your bedroom at all, it's a cheap way to ask the question, and some people will be satisfied with the answer.

The Sequence Pro is built for the night after that question. The gold coil and the sine wave are about the signal being the number on the display; the sequencing and the timer are about nobody getting up at 2am; the dials, the outputs and the handbook are the things fifty thousand owners of the first device asked for. The company made 490 in its first run, which went mostly to those owners, and five thousand in its second, which is shipping now in the order it's bought.