HIFI PIG ADVERTISING PROMOTION

Hifi Pig brings you a series of promotional articles about our Great British Brands exhibiting at High End Munich 2018. We let them tell you all about their philosophy and products.

Tellurium Q are launching their latest creation, the Statement cables at Munich.

They will be at HIFIDELUXE (Marriott hotel, Berliner Strasse 93), in Salon A, from the 10th to the 12th of May, from 12:00 (noon) to 8pm, demonstrating Totaldac d1-seven DAC, Holton Audio amplifiers, Tellurium Q Statement cable loom and Soulsonic HOLOGRAMM-X speakers all in their own 123 sqm room.

The range consists of Speaker cables, Jumpers, XLRs, and Power cables. The performance is taking people by surprise, even those who can compare what the award-winning Silver Diamonds can do.

These are just a couple of the early comments on the new Statement range from actual speaker designers…

“It will just capture you, and carry you along with whatever music is playing. This is the new T/Q cable there is no more that needs to be said!!!!!”

And

“…you have managed to surpass them [Silver Diamonds] in a truly grand way.”

What has been achieved is a coherent sonic profile and performance across the whole Statement range and that is why we say this is the Tellurium Q Statement.

And reviewers are starting to agree with the very first review capturing the highest possible award from Mono and Stereo:

“Tellurium Q Statements are no usual cable affair and if I’ve called the Silver Diamonds an Emotional Tour de Force what are then the Tellurium Q Statements!? Well, they certainly transcend any typical labelling and this time I’m elevating them on the throne, that they clearly deserve. Their stand out, extraordinary performance can only be recognized with the 2018 Editor Choice Award!” -Matej Isak, Mono & Stereo

So what is different, how does the “voodoo” work? This is what Tellurium Q say:

We use the Formula One race car analogy to develop and manufacture our cables for you:

1. What must be there to even make it perform:

• The move from Aluminium to carbon fibre shells allowed formula one cars to be lighter and go faster. Standard fuel is not used in formula one cars, there are many different fuel blends depending on track, season or conditions (including altitude) used instead. So for a Formula One car, what has to be there is a light monocoque shell and right fuel to even enter the race, (amongst myriad other criteria but you get the idea).
• For a cable “mostly” low capacitance and low impedance will get you into the cable performance race but that is also why a road car will never win formula one, you can get from A to B in an ordinary car but without being optimised for the performance of a track it will be inadequate for the task.

2. What needs to be stripped out that will inhibit performance:

• In the race car example you lose the electric windows – they are nice but just add weight which slows the car and hinders what it can do. In the case of a cable, many of the big, metal fancy accoutrements look nice but “can” inhibit the signal – even using non-ferrous materials. So metal has to be added very consciously. Similarly lots of “bling” and padding on a cable can add capacitance which is not the best idea for pure signal transmission either.

3. When all that is taken care of what needs to be “tweaked” to squeeze the last iota of juice from a race car to transform it into a machine that will perform even better:

• With Formula one cars aerodynamic flow over the body is not nearly enough. You need to go further and channel air where you want it to go, giving rise to increased down force and put it where it is most needed to help take the performance to the next level. Similarly, with Tellurium Q cables the simple and unsatisfying answer to squeezing the last drop of performance is that we do a lot of little things together that mount up to be very important in preserving the relative phase relationship of a signal. People assume that to get the best performance the “fastest” conductor – pure silver or something even better must be used. Which is also one of the reasons for the pointless chasing of nines as I call it i.e. copper to 99.999999% purity as if that is the single most crucial factor for a cable! That is just trying to be aerodynamic in the race car analogy and does not even come close to the level of channelling downforce in the car analogy.

Surprisingly, to get the most natural sound, it is not just about merely conduction. This is the reason, any conductor from any cable manufacturer on this planet will act as an electronic filter and by that I mean that the various frequencies relative to one another get shifted with each material they pass through and are also affected by insulators, geometries, shielding etc.. The interesting thing is that materials affect ranges of frequencies in dissimilar amounts. 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 numerous mixes and diverse 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 and it is not the same for each cable either!

The connectors may look relatively ordinary but have multiple layers of plating and not always the material you would expect. There is even more detail and precision within the plating process itself, because we specify the thickness of the plating and what absolutely must be in the plating bath and what should not be.

This is just one or two tiny details that make up just one small part of one cable. The detail, precision and care is the same for the rest of the products. 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.

From what we have learnt, especially in the last few years, we have been able to bring you the Statement cables. They are the Tellurium Q® Statement of the performance that we think is currently possible.