Totem Acoustic
Next we ventured into Vince’s office, where all the speaker designs are dreamt up (so to speak). His desk, in the centre of the large room, was spilling over with stacks of papers covered with hand-written notes and diagrams. Against one of the walls, and facing his desk, were some two dozen various Totem speakers, some existing models and some prototype designs, an assortment of audio components and a listening chair in front of all of the equipment. A wall unit in another part of the office displayed a few one-of-a-kind tube-based amplifiers designed by Vince.
Totem prides itself on taking a distinctly personal approach to speaker design. Many of today’s speaker designers rely heavily on technical measurements involving physics, electrical and mechanical engineering principles. By contrast, Vince relies mostly on his ears, as well as a lot of trial and error, when designing speakers. Only once a new speaker design is nearly ready for production, Vince will test it in an anechoic chamber to ensure that there are no inconsistencies in the frequency response.
Totem’s current speaker range consists of over 30 different models priced for just about every budget – from the $575 Dreamcatcher bookshelves all the way up to $15,000 Wind Design floorstanding speakers. All Totem speaker cabinets are finished in real wood veneers and many models are available in five or six different stain colours. In addition to the wood veneer finishes, the company recently introduced a number of paint finishes, both matte and glossy. And to top it all off, unfinished cabinets can be special ordered from Totem. These cabinets are generally shipped to the customer who will apply their own choice of finish and return them back to the factory where the speaker components will be installed. The possibilities are virtually limitless.
A Walk Through the Parts and Production Facility
During this part of the tour, I was given the opportunity to see exactly how each speaker comes into existence from start to finish. The process begins with the arrival of the speaker cabinets from Totem’s woodshop. Upon arrival, the cabinets are meticulously inspected for any defects – Totem has zero tolerance for imperfections here. How meticulous are they? I was shown cabinets with the tiniest defects, which most people probably wouldn’t ever notice, that were rejected from going into production. Since there are variances in the appearance of real wood veneers, Totem takes the time to select pairs of cabinets that are close matches before assembling the speakers. Totem takes great pride in quality workmanship and this was clear from the very first step.
Next, we walked over to the woofer and tweeter storage area. Most Totem speakers use drivers produced by OEM driver manufacturers, based in Scandinavia, that offer very tight performance tolerances. But these are not just off-the-shelf drivers – Vince asks the OEM speaker developers to produce drivers with very specific parameters. When the drivers arrive at the Totem plant, each one is thoroughly tested prior to being installed in a cabinet. Nico shared a perfect example with me of just how important driver tolerances are to Vince. Recently one of the OEM manufacturers moved its production from Europe to China and sent its new batch of drivers to Totem for evaluation. The drivers did not pass Totem’s acceptance levels, and after some consideration Vince decided to invest in the OEM company so that it could continue manufacturing the drivers in the original factory.
In the speaker business, it is common for a manufacturer to use the same driver or tweeter across a number of different speaker models. This obviously simplifies the design and manufacturing processes but it comes at a cost – the driver may sound great in one speaker model and not so great in another model. Totem on the other hand uses a unique driver for almost every single one of its 30 speaker models. Each driver is designed and fine-tuned to achieve the optimum performance from its particular cabinet. Walking through the speaker driver storage area, Nico assured me that even though some of the drivers appear to be the same, there are indeed technical differences between them.
But not all Totem speakers use OEM woofers. About three years ago Vince branched out into woofer design himself. The first Totem designed and manufactured woofer is a four inch woofer dubbed “Torrent” which can be found in the Tribe III on-wall speakers, designed to accompany flat panel displays. Totem says that this woofer offers incredible speed, extended bass response and increased dynamics compared to the Tribe I and II on-wall speakers.
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