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Totem Forest Signature, Part 13

Posted by Luminator (A) on November 11, 2024 at 16:53:36

In the early-1990s, my college friend Tuyet loved "modern rock" music, and was an art major, whose talent lay in drawing. She had different types of white-colored papers. Before committing to her actual project, she would test out her paints, pencils, and pens, on those sheets of paper.

Our favorite place to de-stress was Santa Cruz's Well Within Spa. Although Tuyet preferred a sauna over a hot tub, here, in the indoor tub room, she liked to kneel, and look out into the garden. She applied the same "you gotta test it" ethos to audio products. If you were trying a new speaker, Tuyet asked, "Shouldn't you try it with multiple systems, in addition to your own? Shouldn't you bring it to a bunch of rooms, so you know if it's the speaker, and not your room?" She continued, "And after all that, then you can compare it to other speakers."

Okay, okay, audiophiles just want to stay home, play video games, give each other a bad time, and listen to music. But since my friends have been evaluating the Totem Forest Signature, we have spent the past half a year, bringing it to a multitude of Bay Area homes. In a separate post, perhaps we'll share some photos of the rooms we have tried to use the Forest Signature in.

One of my audiophile acquaintances has a Totem Forest Signature in cherry. He bellows, "You dumb broads have it all wrong. You should use a medium-power push-pull vacuum tube amp. Get one with a total of four EL-34s or 6550s."

He's not wrong. But we in the future will address the $$$$ power amps (both tube and solid state), which are appropriate for, and get the most out of, the Forest Signature. But for half a year, we've been using affordable electronics, including this Yamaha receiver.

While hubby was setting up the Forest Signature, he told the wife to hook up the receiver. Hubby just stood by silently, while the perplexed wife tried to stick an RCA plug from a patchcord, into the receiver's binding posts. I will not repeat the curse words the wife yelled.

Hubby stood by silently, while the wife punched out, "Hey, the receiver only has four of these thingies, while the two speakers have four each. WTF?!"

I was not about to get between hubby and his wife, while the latter was about to shove the speaker end cables up his...

Hubby had to explain that, like all Totems, the Forest Signature is bi-wireable. We will cover bi-wiring in a future post.

We've left the usual unaffordable interconnects at my place. While the Forest Signature has made the rounds, we've just used the lightweight (but Cooked) Kimber PBJ.

"That's either a carrot or fallopian tubes," said the wife.

While hubby continued to explain the concept of bi-wiring, my friends have primarily used Kimber's 12TC, plus a 4TC jumper set.

Hubby told the wife to hook up a mass-market turntable. He then stood back in total silence, and watched her figure it out.

Because of ads, I had become aware of Totem Acoustic, by January 1992. But it was Stereophile's April 1993 review of the original Totem Model 1, which gripped me. At that time, my very last quarter of college, we had gotten the Cranberries' Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We on CD. Because record stores had stopped carrying LPs, we did not see it on vinyl.

With (a) mass market turntables, (b) audio/video receivers, and (c) the typically bad popular music pressings, the Totem Forest Signature is actually a bit forgiving. First, it has twitchy-tight bass. Second, it nails rhythms. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it does not make the upper-midrange worse. If the vinyl pressing rolls off the upper-mids, the Forest Signature lets you know, but at the same time, does not artificially muffle it. If the vinyl pressing is wiry and plagued with that upper-midrange warble, the Forest Signature does not spotlight these qualities, or make them worse.

During the 1992-93 school year, my college stereo consisted of Adcom's GTP-400 tuner/preamp and GFA-535 power amp. While we no longer have those two, we still have Adcom's GTP-450 and GFA-6002. While I read and re-read that April 1993 Stereophile review of the Totem Model 1, the first "new" CD we bought was Belly's Star. We wished we had had it a half month earlier, at the March 1993 Stereophile Show in San Francisco. Tuyet liked Belly's "Feed The Tree," which seemed appropriate, for UC Santa Cruz's trees. Moreover, the redwood trees made you want to get the Totem Model 1 in mahogany (as opposed to black).

Going from an A/V receiver to the entry-level Adcom pair is not a quantum leap. Still, the Forest Signature allows you to hear that the Adcoms do a better job of preserving the contrast between images and the silences between them. And then, when you listen to Belly's "Feed The Tree," the Adcoms give you a hint, that the Forest Signature may be capable of pulsating basslines.

Even with less-than-ideal electronics, the Forest Signature, if used in a mid-sized room, will not sound bad. So if you end up with a Forest Signature as your first audio product, it will buy you time, to try out (and later afford) better electronics and cables.

Now that the Forest Signature has been out and about for half a year, and is back in my home, it's been "broken in." Versus when it was here half a year ago, it sounds slightly cleaner, more precise and detailed. It was already snappy, but now it maintains and exercises even greater control.

Some of the others who have borrowed it are bummed. For those with the space for a compact floorstander, they miss the unstoppable and infectious rhythms, the beats and pulse, the snap and punch to drums. Because of the speed, and the smaller and more focused images, the Forest Signature made video gaming highly addictive. Uh oh, expect to see friends come over more often!

-Lummy The Loch Monster

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

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