Totem Tribe Towers

I bought new speakers. This story combines beautiful music with advanced analogue technology and nerdy obsession. Despite which, many of you are not fascinated by high-end audio; you can leave now. Hey, this is a blog, I get to write about what excites me. The seventeen of you who remain will probably enjoy the deep dive.

Why? · My main speakers were 22 years old, bore scars from toddlers (now grown) and cats (now deceased). While they still sounded beautiful, there was loss of precision. They’d had a good run.

Speakers matter · Just in the last year, I’ve become convinced, and argued here, that both DACs and amplifiers are pretty well solved problems, that there’s no good reason to spend big money on them, and that you should focus your audio investments on speakers and maybe room treatment. So this purchase is a big deal for me.

How to buy? · The number of boutique speaker makers, from all over the world, is mind-boggling; check out the Stereophile list of recommendations. Here’s the thing: Pretty well all of them sound wonderful. (The speakers I bought haven’t been reviewed by Stereophile.)

So there are too many options. Nobody could listen to even a small proportion of them, at any price point. Fortunately, I had three powerful filters to narrow down the options. The speakers had to (1) look nice, and (2) be Canadian products, probably (3) from Totem Acoustic.

Decor? · I do not have, nor do I want, a man-cave. I’ve never understood the concept.

And you have to be careful. There are high-end speakers, some very well-reviewed, with design sensibilities right out of Mad Max or Brazil. And then a whole bunch that are featureless rectangles with drivers on the front.

Ours have to live in a big media alcove just off the kitchen; they are shared by the pure-audio system and the huge TV. The setup has to please the eyes of the whole family.

Canadian? · At this point in time, a position of “from anywhere but the US, the malignant force threatening our sovereignty” would be unsurprising in a Canadian. But there are unsentimental reasons, too. It turns out Canadian speaker makers have had an advantage stretching back many decades.

This is mostly due to the work of Floyd Toole, electrical engineer and acoustician, once an employee of Canada’s National Research Council, who built an anechoic chamber at the NRC facility, demonstrated that humans can reliably detect differences in speaker accuracy, and made his facility available to commercial speaker builders. So there have been quite a few good speakers built up here over the years.

Totem? · What happened was, in 1990 or so I went to an audio show down East somewhere and met Vince Bruzzese, founder of Totem Acoustic, who was showing off his then-brand-new “Model One” speakers. They were small, basic-black, and entirely melted my heart playing a Purcell string suite. They still sell them, I see. Also, the Totem exhibit was having a quiet spell so there was time to talk, and it turned out that Bruzzese and I liked a lot of the same music.

So I snapped up the Model Ones and that same set is still sounding beautiful over at our cabin. And every speaker I’ve bought in the intervening decades has come from Totem or from PSB, another excellent Toole-influenced Canadian shop. I’ve also met and conversed with Paul Barton, PSB’s founder and main brain. Basically, there’s a good chance that I’ll like anything Vince or Paul ship.

My plan was to give a listen to those two companies’ products. A cousin I’d visited last year had big recent PSB speakers and I liked them a whole lot, so they were on my menu. But PSB seems to have given up on audio dealers, want to sell online. Huh?! Maybe it’ll work for them, but it doesn’t work for me.

So I found a local Totem dealer; audiofi in Mount Pleasant.

Auditioning · For this, you should use some of your most-listened-to tracks from your own collection. I took my computer along for that purpose, but it turned out that Qobuz had ’em all. (Hmm, maybe I should look closer at Qobuz.)

Here’s what was on my list. I should emphasize that, while I like all these tracks, they’re not terribly representative of what I listen to. They’re selected to stress out a specific aspect of audio reproduction. The Americana and Baroque and Roots Rock that I’m currently fixated on are pretty easy to reproduce.

• 200 More Miles from the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session. Almost any track from this record would do; they recorded with a single ambiphonic microphone and any competent setup should make it feel like you’re in the room with them. And Margo’s singing should make you want to cry.

• The Longships, from Enya’s Watermark album. This is a single-purpose test for low bass. It has these huge carefully-tuned bass-drum whacks that just vanish on most speakers without extreme bass extension, and the music makes much less sense without them. You don’t have to listen to the whole track; but it’s fine music, Enya was really on her game back then.

• The opening of Dvořák’s Symphony #9, “From the New World”. There are plenty of good recordings, but I like Solti and the Chicago Symphony. Dvořák gleefully deploys jump-scare explosions of massed strings and other cheap orchestration tricks in the first couple of minutes to pull you into the symphony. What I’m looking for is the raw physical shock of the first big full-orchestra entrance.

• Death Don’t Have No Mercy from Hot Tuna’s Live At Sweetwater Two. Some of the prettiest slide guitar you’ll hear anywhere from Kaukonen, and magic muscle from Casady. And then Jorma’s voice, as comfortable as old shoes and full of grace. About three minutes in there’s an instrumental break and you want to hear the musical lines dancing around each other with no mixups at all.

• First movement of Beethoven’s Sonata #23, “Appassionata”, Ashkenazy on London. Pianos are very difficult; two little speakers have a tiny fraction of the mass and vibrating surface of a big concert grand. It’s really easy for the sound to be on the one hand too small, or on the other all jumbled up. Ashkenazy and the London engineers do a fine job here; it really should sound like he’s sitting across the room from you.

• Cannonball, the Breeders’ big hit. It’s a pure rocker and a real triumph of arrangement and production, with lots of different guitar/keys/drum tones. You need to feel it in your gut, and the rock & roll edge should be frightening.

• Identikit from Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. This is mostly drums and voice, although there are eventually guitar interjections. It’s a totally artificial construct, no attempt to sound like live musicians in a real space. But the singing and drumming are fabulous and they need to be 100% separated in space, dancing without touching. And Thom Yorke in good voice had better make you shiver a bit.

• Miles Runs The Voodoo Down from Bitches Brew. This is complex stuff, and Teo Macero’s production wizardry embraces the complexity without losing any of that fabulous band’s playing. Also Miles plays two of the greatest instrumental solos ever recorded, any instrument, any genre, and one or two of the ascending lines should feel like he’s pulling your whole body up out of your chair.

• Emmylou Harris. This would better be phrased as “Some singer you have strong emotional reactions to.” I listened to the title track and Deeper Well from the Wrecking Ball album. If a song that can make you feel that way doesn’t make you feel that way, try different speakers.

The listening session · I made an appointment with Phil at Audiofi, and we spent much of an afternoon listening. I thought Audiofi was fine, would go back. Phil was erudite and patient and not pushy and clearly loves the technology and music and culture.

I was particularly interested in the Element Fire V2, which has been creating buzz in online audiophile conversation. They’re “bookshelf” (i.e. stand-mounted) rather than floorstanders, but people keep saying they sound like huge tower speakers that are taller than you are. So I was predisposed to find them interesting, and I listened to maybe half of the list above.

But I was unhappy, it just wasn’t making me smile. Sure, there was a stereo image, but at no point did I get a convincing musicians-are-right-over-there illusion. It was particularly painful on the Cowboy Junkies. It leapt satisfactorily out of the speakers on the Dvořák and was brilliant on Cannonball, but there were too many misses.

Also, the longer I looked at it the less it pleased my eyes.

“Not working, sorry. Let’s listen to something else” I said. I’d already noticed the Tribe Towers, which even though they were floorstanders, looked skinny and pointy compared to the Elements. I’d never read anything about them but they share the Element’s interesting driver technology, and are cheaper.

So we set them up and they absolutely aced everything the Elements had missed. Just vanished, I mean, and there was a three-dimensional posse of musicians across the room, filling the space with three-dimensional music. They flunked the Enya drum-thwack test but that’s OK because I have a subwoofer (from PSB) at home. In particular, they handled Ashkenazy pounding out the Beethoven just absolutely without effort. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard better piano reproduction.

And the longer I looked at them the more my thinking switched from “skinny and pointy” to “slender and elegant”.

A few minutes in and, I told Phil, I was two-thirds sold. He suggested I look at some Magico speakers but they were huge and like $30K; as an audiophile I’m only mildly deranged. And American, so no thanks.

I went home to think about it. I was worried that I’d somehow been unfair to the Elements. Then I read the Stereophile review, and while the guy who did the subjective listening test loved ’em, the lab measurements seemed to show real problems.

I dunno. Maybe that was the wrong room for them. Or the wrong amplifier. Or the wrong positioning. Or maybe they’re just a rare miss from Totem.

My research didn’t turn up a quantitative take on the Tribes, just a lot of people writing that they sound much bigger than they really are, and that they were happy they’d bought them.

And I’d been happy listening to them. So I pulled the trigger. My listening space is acoustically friendlier than the one at Audiofi and if they made me happy there, they’d make me happy at home.

And they do. Didn’t worry too much about positioning, just made sure it was symmetric. The first notes they played were brilliant.

But how does it sound? · See all those auditioning tracks up above, where it says what speakers “should” do? They do, that’s what they sound like.

I’ve been a little short on sleep, staying up late to listen to music.

Follow-up: Customer service · As noted above I have a subwoofer, and my preamp lets you configure where to roll off the bass going to the main speakers and hand off to the subwoofer. I wrote off to Totem’s customer-support email address wondering if they had any guidance on frequency. They got back to me with specific advice, and another couple of things to double-check.

High-end audio. Simpatico salespeople. The products last decades. The vendors answer emails from random customers. Businesses it’s still possible to like.

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