Why No Tech Specs?

Tellurium Q® technical specifications are missing! We were talking with a distributor and they were asking about how and why our cables were so different to anything they had heard before. It had to be said that the discussion became almost heated as the distributor insisted that customers and reviewers will want to know how the cables work as they do. I said that giving the technical specifications would actually cause the customer a problem because they could only then calibrate that information to what they had already heard but we did not believe that our approach was that of a “normal” cable maker.

We are not talking about something new to science because what we do is firmly based in current science, it is just that our focus is different. This is what I told the distributor way back then:

  1. Because the cables have been designed from first principles with a different starting point (we believe), the numbers won’t help understand what they may sound like. You actually have to listen to them in a system you are familiar with to really get what they do. Customers and reviewers consistently report to us that the difference is not in any way a minor change.
  2. Why should we hand over all the hard work in R&D to our competitors?
  3. Tellurium Q® cables do not have the same starting point in terms of the model we use compared to other cables people have heard before so even if we did publish the technical specifications people would only be able to calibrate the information to what they have encountered already and then erroneously pigeon hole Tellurium Q®.
  4. We are not claiming to have found the holy grail in cables we are just saying that we are focusing on the problem of the distortion of relative phase frequencies and in doing so have (we feel) produced and are producing some outstanding products which represent excellent value for their performance.
  5. I guess that we are unusual in that we really do want people to listen to our cable against similarly priced products because we know that people will mostly choose Tellurium Q® once they have switched rapidly between products a few times and appreciate what our cables are doing for your system. The weird thing is that cables present one of the greatest blocks to a system’s performance and your system is capable of far more than you realise. This is only manifests when a cable that has been engineered to access that misused potential is connected into your system.
  6. When designing a cable we start with the model of transient relative phase distortion. To try to simplify this idea you can think of waveforms of different frequencies being shifted relative to one another as they go through different materials and different volumes/masses of materials. In a very rudimentary way to perceive it. Where it seems to matter is in the transients – leading and trailing edges of waveforms. This is also why the traditional model of capacitance, inductance and resistance for a cable is just not enough to consider when designing for as “natural” as possible audio reproduction. If other cables are designed with only a regard for capacitance, inductance and resistance then why would Tellurium Q® cables sound the same?

I hope that you enjoy the performance of your system when you audition our cables.

Geoff Merrigan,

Tellurium Q®