Tellurium Q Ultra Black

[GuillaumeB]

I 'm trying different SC's now, having become disappointed with Chord Sarum TA's with my Dev 250.

Do you mean the Chord Sarum speaker cables? If so can I ask you how long you have owned them and how much usage they have had? 

I've owned Sarum for a couple of years. For the first few months I was very unhappy with them since they did not sound anywhere near as good as the demo ones. In fact they didn't sound good at all leading me to get in touch with Chord themselves as I thought there might have been a fault with my pair. I also spoke to a few Chord dealers with experience of this cable.

It turns out that for some reason these cables need a ridiculous amount of time to burn in, something that isn't widely advertised. They started to improve noticeably around 1000 hours of use but became truly special around 2000 hours (crazy, I know). During that period I ran my music 24/7 and it was a good 3 or 4 months before I started to enjoy them. As you can imagine it was an extremely frustrating time and I almost did get rid of them on several occasions. 

In the past year or so I have compared a number of Transparent cables including the Reference level at almost double the price of Sarum and these did not even come close, the Sarums were just leaps better. I've had a number of people who are familiar with the cable hear my system and be extremely surprised (including the local Tellurium Q distributor); Sarum speaker cable is sometimes described as being a bit bright/glassy/shimmery and that is certainly what I experienced in the first few months of ownership. However this is no longer the case and they are now just incredibly transparent.

Guillaume