Tellurium Q

Ultra Silver II Cables

Speaker Cables: AUD $5,270 RRP (2.5m pair)
XLR Interconnect: AUD $1,960 RRP (1m pair)

Currently celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, Tellurium Q is quite the British success story – even though its inception may not have been as strategically planned as some others. The story goes that it only exists today because its head honcho, Geoff Merrigan, lost a bet! That said, he and his team went on to produce hi-fi cables that have won many gongs – not least of which a brace of Queen's Awards for Enterprise.

Tellurium Q cables fall into three families, namely Blue, Black and Silver – each of which is subdivided into performance profiles. The Ultra Silver for instance, sits just below the top-flight Silver Diamond range within its familial branch. Outside this hierarchy is the flagship Statement line, a no-holds-barred range that shows what the team can do when not working to a price point.

In this review, we are looking at two offerings from the second generation of its Ultra Silver range in the form of an XLR interconnect pair and a set of speaker cables. These have been freshly assembled at the company's production facilities in Somerton, Somerset. Anyone who has read Tellurium Q product reviews before will know Geoff gives famously little away. That's his prerogative of course, as "careless talk costs lives" in cable design – or something like that! Suffice to say that a huge amount of time is spent experimenting with different materials in multiple combinations.

UP CLOSE

You would think that – being called Ultra Silver II – this cable line must contain some silver, right? "We do not comment on the materials used," Geoff told me, "however, the connectors are a specific multilayered plate with a pure silver final plate." After comparing the new Ultra Silver II XLRs with the previous version, the connectors looked the same. Although perfectly serviceable, I wondered if the company considered using the TeCu connectors from the Black Diamond series or any alternatives. To this point, I got the enigmatic response of, "good question"!

When pushed for more insights into the new design, he told me, "you will notice that they feel very different between the old version and the MKII, just holding the old and new versions in your hand. The solder is the same between the two iterations. The shielding is very different. Even the thickness of that shielding was subject to many, many iterations of materials and thicknesses to get the best balance with what the rest of the cable could do. That is far from all that is new, though…"

Indeed, the new loudspeaker cable is thicker than the original Ultra Silver, which means it's slightly less pliant than its predecessor but still much easier to route than some of the anaconda-style designs out there. I am a fan of the low-profile ribbon form factor, though. The increased thickness of the cable suggests that the conductor and/or dielectric are very much changed on the new version, and it must go some way to explain why Tellurium Q has felt that this range is an upgrade to what has gone before.

Interestingly, the price of the new series stays the same. I asked Geoff if this was down to more efficient manufacturing, or more about proving to yourself that you can still make better-performing products? "A bit of both," he told me. "We try not to use development as an excuse to bump up prices unless we absolutely must. R&D costs are amortised across the estimated life of a product, and this better have a really long life."

After fifteen years of building cables, which is a challenging area to work in, what drives TQ to continue to develop its products? "Cables present an issue for signals. Tellurium Q views that problem as an opportunity and takes a contrarian approach to cable development by focusing on and minimising those issues, allowing the music to sound as intended. It takes a crushingly boring amount of time, iteration, testing, and retesting, then doing it all over again to inch forward."

For the purposes of this review, the Ultra Silver II XLR interconnect was used between Gryphon Essence pre and power amps and MOON North Collection 891 streaming pre and 861 power amp units. Some time was also spent with it between a YBA phono stage and the preamps. The speaker cables went to Audiovector R 6 Arrete loudspeakers.

THE LISTENING

Fans of existing Tellurium Q Ultra Silver cables will be happy to hear that there is a close family resemblance between these and the Ultra Silver II, at least inasmuch as its particular skill for detail retrieval has been retained. However, there are notable differences in other areas, which depend on where you place the interconnect. Suffice to say that these new cables get out of the way of the music more than the previous generation.

Suppose that you are considering cables in this price range. If so, then the chances are that your components and wires are already of a high quality. In my case, the new Tellurium Q cables replaced similarly priced offerings from a renowned Swedish brand. After a week of listening to my system with the TQ cables in situ, I returned to my usual brand. There was a definite drop in incisiveness and purity, as the TQ cables had been giving me a more explicit rendition of the recording.

Vocal articulation in particular, both in spoken word and songs, had cleaner edges with the TQ cables. Tracks such as Everest by Public Service Broadcasting and the much-utilised Royer Track taken from the Syn-Aud-Con Test CD highlighted this particular skill regarding speech. This translated excellently to Daniel Hope's violin and the glassy synth in Summer 2 of Max Richter's Four Seasons Recomposed. For me, my reference Audiovectors seemed like they had nothing standing in their way.

Percussion also had more snap, and lost some of the rounded edges that I hadn't realised were present with my own set. The original Ultra Silver seemed to slightly thin-out the kick drum in Mr Big's cover version of Free's Mr Big, resulting in it getting a little lost amongst the reverb. However, the new Ultra Silver II not only brought the body of the beat back to where I am used to, but also better brought out the impact of the strike.

Comparing the old Ultra Silver with the new, and there is a noticeable increase in focus and transparency – especially with the speaker cables. Meanwhile, although for most of my time with the Ultra Silver II XLR, it was sat between preamp and power amps so that the whole system could benefit, hooking it up at the end of my YBA phono stage into the Gryphon preamp gave tracks such as Pocket Calculator by Kraftwerk a wonderfully musical emphasis. Again, the vocals seemed to have benefitted from a spring clean, and were now a step forward in the soundstage.

THE VERDICT

Tellurium Q's Ultra Silver II cables are more than simply the latest version of what came before. Both the new interconnect and speaker cables deliver more detail and clarity, thanks to their impressively translucent sound. This disappearing trick should be the aim of any high-end manufacturer, and TQ has certainly pulled it off here. Should your system merit it and your budget cover it, then this new cable is an essential audition that could well be for you.

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