REVIEW – Tellurium Q Ultra Black II Speaker Cable

Tellurium Q Ultra Black II Speaker Cable is the latest incarnation of this British company’s Ultra Black cable and costs £310 per metre. Ian Ringstead plumbs it into his system for Hifi Pig.

“I’m no stranger to Tellurium Q cables and I have been using the highly regarded TQ Ultra Black mk1 version for a couple of years now as my system reference speaker cable. It made perfect sense for me to review the new MkII version, so Geoff Merrigan kindly had a 3m stereo pair sent to me with jumper cables as my speakers are bi-wireable. What goes into Geoff’s cable designs is a close kept secret and to be honest it doesn’t matter. Geoff is a chemist by training, so he has a great understanding of materials and elements. I see him as a magical alchemist who has an ability to get the best out of materials by instinct and hard graft at experimenting. Cable design is a black art to my way of thinking (pun unintended) and the ability to use certain metals as conductors and di-electrics as insulation is not a simple task. Jean Hiraga in the 1980’s concluded that cables sound different and that some sounded far better than others, a fact many disputed then and some still do now. It was no different to the original assumption that if a piece of electronic audio equipment measured better than another then it had to be better sounding. This doesn’t hold water now, but as to why is a mystery…”