TELLURIUM Q STATEMENT CABLE LOOM REVIEW PART ONE

If some product performs so well in all the regards and especially when it comes to the high-end audio cabling (where the paper tiger swording triggers instantly) what can you expect, when the manufacturer tells you, how they’ve managed to achieve a significant step up on the already highly established performance…

At the end of the last year, Geoff Merrigan from Tellurium Q had contacted me and in a bit secretive way and silently introduce me the Tellurium Q Statement cables. He wanted me to experienced them in my own system and I’ve agreed on trying out the XLR, RCA and speakers’ cable loom. Geoff had insisted to keep all the details or his personal comments private, to avoid any precognitions before my listenings. Short after our conversation package with the cables arrived and a few weeks later he personally came to Slovenia. We spend quite some time with listening and he finally provides more in-depth insights about the all-new flagship cable line called Tellurium Q Statement. 

“TQ is asked what we do that makes our cables work as they do. The simple and unsatisfying answer is that we do a lot of little things together that mount up to be very important in preserving the relative phase of a signal. People assume that to get the best performance then you have to use the “fastest” conductor – pure silver of something even better. Which is also one of the reasons for the pointless chasing of nines as I call it i.e. copper to 99.9999999% purity as if that is the single most important fact for a cable! 

It is not just about pure conduction because any conductor from any cable manufacturer on this planet will act as an electronic filter and by that I mean that the relative frequencies relative to one another get shifted with each material they go through and are also affected by the various insulators, geometries, shielding etc.. The interesting thing is that various materials affect different frequencies in dissimilar amounts. So it really is a finely tuned balancing act to make sure that you get a natural, transparent transmission. This takes a LOT more research than people would imagine. Even down to the solder that we use. Not standard by any means for the audio industry and we have tried various mixes and various percentages of silver in the solder but at the end of our testing and development we find we have a solder with no silver whatsoever (no lead either). Even the process by which we solder and the temperature/time “envelope” to complete the process is tightly controlled and specified. Down to that detail we work. The connectors may look relatively ordinary but have multiple layers of plating and not always the material you would expect. There is more detail even within the plating itself, because we even specify the layer thickness and what has to be in the plating bath and what should not be.   

This is just one or two small details that make up just one small part of one cable. The detail, precision and care is the same for the rest of the product. And each little step needs a controlled listening and testing against other options which is immensely time consuming but hopefully the results speak for themselves. 

THE FILTER NETWORK!?

The more you focus on the fact that you are working with an electronic filter, then the easier it becomes to craft a much more transparent and natural sounding cable, engineering each part of the signal path to minimise distortion. But there is a huge downside to this, as every little detail of the constituents used and construction has to be tested in multiple configurations….and of course listened to. 

The cable construction becomes more complex, using multiple stranded conductors of slightly different materials and various dielectric materials and geometries. We have to pay attention to every part of each of our processes. Even using non-industry standard solder mixes varied between cables. Raw ingredients for the construction are highly specified, as are plating thicknesses, even down to specifying what chemicals should or should not be included in a plating bath. 

When Tellurium Q® was set up the focus was primarily on phase distortion and minimising this problem inherent in all cabling, whoever makes them and where ever and however they are made. The reason it is a problem is simple, all materials (not just cables) in the path of a signal will act as an electronic filter according to the definition in the box below, whether you want it to or not. This is undeniable.

Please understand we use the word filter as its scientific definition and not necessarily as something being “filtered out” like with a mechanical sieve. We are primarily focused on removing the smearing of frequencies through a timing shift, and by doing this you get better clarity and transparency from Tellurium Q® cables. 

“A filter is an electrical network that alters the amplitude and/or phase characteristics of a signal with respect to frequency. Ideally, a filter will not add new frequencies to the input signal, nor will it change the component frequencies of that signal, but it will change the relative amplitudes of the various frequency components and/or their phase relationships.” – Source: National Semiconductor Corporation 

N.B. This is true of all speakers, amplifiers, DACs, CD players, cables etc…in fact anything in the signal path.

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