Replacing Totems One's

Keep the Totems. Bring them out into the room for serious listening. You won't get great imaging from any speaker that's back against the wall.

I didn't know your Totems weren't even elevated to ear-level.

I consider the Ayre a keeper as well.

Is the music on your Mac Mini stored in a lossless (e.g., as WAV or ALC) or lossy file format?

I'd vote for keeping them too.....I sold mine when I moved to the Vandersteen 2ce's and I like that change, BUT then when I needed a second system, I was kicking myself for parting with them..

Yes, all files are lossless. I replaced the Mac Mini HD with a new 500gb 7200rpm hardrive and it's still silent like a mouse and with the Devilsound Dac it sounds as good or better than a Meridian G08 that a friend of mine lent me. I borrowed it to use as a reference to find out where I'm at.

I then went to my friends house with my MacBook Pro and the Devilsound to connect it to his monster system and compare it to his Meridian 808i.2 CD player with the exact same music but mine was on hardrive. At off axis, it sounded the same, the devilsound was doing nothing wrong, we couldn't believe it, then sat in the sweet spot and the difference more noticeable with less air, imaging and smaller soundstage but pretty damn close. It sounded nice and not at all tiring or lacking since considering the Devilsound/Mac was competing with a $18K CD player. He's ordering a Devilsound to play with.

Sorry, I digressed.

I'm keeping the Totem's, since I put them on the Parallam, the sound is 10xs better than before but it is lacking some of the imaging and soundstage depth that the totem's are really known for but that's life when forced to keep speakers too close to the wall. The Arye 7 is such a good match for the Totems, I feel very lucky how good the setup sounds.

I may continue to keep my eyes out if I hear about another mind blowing monitor but I'm not nearly looking as hard now.

Cheers