Tellurium Q® is often asked what do we do that makes our cables perform so well? The simple and unsatisfying answer is that we do a lot of little things together that mount up to be very important in terms of the final performance. People assume that to get the best performance the “fastest” conductor – pure silver of something even better has to be used. 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 factor for a cable!
Surprisingly, to get a more “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.
This is the model that we use, a way of thinking about cable development. In a Bell labs report from way back in 1930 they found that transient phase distortion affected the “naturalness” of voices. Of course there are many things that contribute to the fact that Statement cables are winning so many awards and firsts. But this “naturalness” is one of the prime factors that we listen for in the final production ready cable.
This testing process is more iterative 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).
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 has to be in the plating bath and what should not be.
These are just a couple of 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.
