Hifi Pig Advertising Promotion

Hifi Pig brings you a series of promotional articles about our Great British Brands exhibiting at High End Munich 2017. We let them tell you all about their philosophy and products.

The last two years have been something of a revelation for the small Tellurium Q® team. The Silver Diamond cables have been so well received by owners and reviewers alike. From developing them we have been able to put that understanding back into cables like the Black II speaker cable, which is getting some seriously great feedback from people who have heard it, compared to the old Black cable that Tellurium Q® first started out with.

The comparisons between the Black II and the old Black are almost a metaphor for the development of the entire team at Tellurium Q®. The Black II has more body and is far more detailed and sophisticated to listen to, bringing more of your music to life naturally. That is where we are focused. Having developed a strong following and brand presence in Europe and been surprised by the incredible reception with media and customers in Thailand we are now looking at offering Tellurium Q® initially to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Korea as our next concerted step. Hopefully we will find good dealers and distributors in those countries to help with our next phase of development.

So what’s so special about Tellurium Q®? What is the “story” to give customers, a hook, a reason to listen when there are so many companies claiming big things? Why should people believe that we have a genuinely different approach? Yes, a client can hear this is true within seconds of listening, yes, Tellurium Q® have amassed many product awards and even reviewers, like Jeff Dorgay from Tone Audio, are commenting “Great to see that so many of us in the press agree on how great these cables are! That should send a strong message to the public”. However, the big problem is giving people a reason to want to listen having not yet heard the cable without giving the whole blue print of “how to” to our competitors.

Paradoxically the faster that front end components like DACs etc improve, and they certainly are getting better year on year, then the more important your cabling becomes. In order to develop better cabling we have taken a very realistic approach to our research and treat cables exactly as they need to be treated. This is going to upset some people but it is the undeniable and scientific truth, all cables from any manufacturer act as electronic filters.

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

This is true of anything a signal passes through, in fact anything in the signal path.

a. Forget the cable is an electronic filter (completely in the face of science) and compromise by having a smeared sound

or

b. Do something about it and engineer as clear and phase neutral a path for the signal as possible to get the most transparent sound that current technology will allow, and preserve the original signal phase relations as much as possible.

Unfortunately, it is not as easy as just looking at a chart of materials and simply picking the one with the best conductivity. If that were the case, then you would put some silver wire in place and the job would be done.

Some time ago, we had some pure silver connectors manufactured and like all our developments, tested them in a double blind situation. These we put against silver plated connectors using various base metal mixes and various thicknesses of plating. The pure silver performed worse than a plated connector with a “certain” thickness of plating. It was sluggish and almost muffled by comparison.

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 differing 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. There is no single “magic bullet”, attention needs to be paid to every last detail to balance the various signal frequencies to ensure that your system can perform at its best.

Many of our connectors are now a specific grade of Tellurium copper and the hidden secret for all these years was in plain view all the time. The “Q” of Tellurium Q® is the letter denoting the quality factor in electronic filters. The reason for this, is that if you do not fully understand that a cable acts as a filter then you will be unlikely to be able to make it as neutral as possible.

That focus has allowed our cable owners to enjoy some of the most natural sounding music that they have heard and have won an incredible number of awards.

We hope that you will have the opportunity to hear what we have been developing. Please have a look at the Tellurium Q® website for the latest information: www.telluriumq.com

Still to come in our Great British Brands At Munich 2017 series are articles from Harbeth, Funk Firm, Quadraspire, Living Voice and Graham Slee.