christie s, no the cables are not soldered and usually it's not a problem when prototyping
I told you here and I tell you again: you need to solder those wires in order for them to work reliably. If you don't want to solder wires directly to the Trill, you can use the pin header that came with Trill and solder that instead and then use socket wires. If soldering the headers, make sure they are soldered on what is the top of the PCB in your picture above.
christie as I connect v to v and g to g of the trill it bleats disconnected
This could be because the tips of the pins on the other side of the Trill touch. Again, solder the wires or pins and you won't have that problem.
To know about pullup resistors, see here but any effort is pointless if you don't solder those wires first.
