Totem Acoustic Forest Signatures

Just poking around and happily stumbled on this great thread. I’ve had my black gloss Forest Signatures for about a year, and they are far and away the best balanced, most satisfying speakers I have owned in 40+ years in this hobby (including Wilson Watt3/Puppy2, Quad esl-63 and Vandersteen Quatros). I’m running mine with a Plinius Hautonga (200wpc) integrated, which is a much better match for them than my previous electronics (VTL MB-125s with Audible Illusions m3a pre - not too shabby in their own right). So I definitely agree that the Forest Sigs benefit from lots of clean power.

I’m using all MIT in the signal path, including CVTerminator biwire speaker cables. I’m intrigued by the earlier comments about going single wire with jumpers, but my cables are dedicated bi-wire so that experiment will have to wait for another day.

Just wanted to mention that that you can fine tune the sound by changing the black balls under the skid plates. I tried both brass and carbon steel - the brass balls give a very smooth, warm presentation, but I ultimately settled on the hardened carbon steel. Not quite as warm as the brass, but more dynamic and extended. In my room, the metal balls provided more transparency and an even cleaner top end than the oem black rubber balls (this was Vince B’s suggestion, btw, not my own).  I also placed a small bdr disc under each, all of which sits on 1.75” maple plinths.

So very glad to see there are others out there who have found this under-appreciated speaker. IMHO, given the superb parts quality, flawless fit and finish and, most importantly, the glorious sound, it would be a bargain at twice the price!

Thanks, N!  Trying to keep a low internet profile these days, but this seems like a nice forum to share some set up ideas and listening experiences with these great speakers which, like you guys, seem to me to be under-represented out there. 

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Thanks, Dave_b, I just read your post in another thread and your story leading back to the totems does, indeed, sound similar to mine (although my earlier totem experience was with a pair of pre-signature, biwire model 1s, which I still have in my basement).

Nutty - After almost 20 years with an AI preamp and VTL amps, the Plinius sounds very neutral to me, neither overtly yin as described by some reviewers nor yang as described by others. The best compliment I can pay any audio component is that it never draws any attention to itself, and that has been my experience with the Hautonga - I don’t hear it adding or subtracting anything of its own. It has more than enough power in reserve for my small-medium sized space (~180 sq ft). N, I don’t know where you are located, but if you call Thomas at New York Sound & Vision, he can hook you up with plinius. I’ve found him to be knowledgeable, reliable and competitive on pricing. I haven’t had any service issues in the 10-11 months that I have the plinius - it sure seems like a bullet-proof brick to me. I went to it for the express purpose of downsizing and getting away from the hands on of tubes, but without making any sonic compromises. I feel like it is a huge success on all counts, exactly what I was looking for and a perfect match for the Forest Sigs. (I did not feel that way about the vtls, good as they are, the totems needed more grip on the bottom). I have zero tolerance for any hint of midrange glare or treble brightness/harshness, so it is possible that what sounds neutral to me would sound warm to someone else but, as I said, I honestly do not detect a particular sonic signature of any kind from the plinius through the totems.

Analog front end is an SME 10/IV with a Lyra Kleos cartridge and a vintage Cotter mk2L sut, cd is via BAT VK-D5 with hdcd and diy ‘six-pak’ upgrade. I also listen to Spotify via an audioengine B1 Bluetooth receiver/24-bit dac which sounds surprisingly good for its $189 price tag. It doesn’t have the detail or palpable 3D presence of my other front end components, but it is perfectly enjoyable - you can listen to it all day and it won’t make an unpleasant sound.

Anyway, to get back on track, I found the Forest Sigs are revealing enough to make changes in upstream components clearly audible, they’ll let you know exactly what a new component is doing right or wrong. Even power cord changes, which used to be of little interest to me, became much more noticeable with these speakers. I dealt with it by going with all one manufacturer. I personally chose Marigo, but there are plenty of contenders. While it may seem more obvious for signal cables, I was very surprised by the huge increase in overall coherence when I stopped randomly mixing and matching a/c cables. Again, the Forest Sigs made the difference(s) easy to hear.

Be very careful when you experiment with hard decoupling balls - the rear of the speakers will literally be on ball bearings. I used the very thin bdr discs to help keep them in place, with a nice little boost in overall resolution as a bonus. I think the current bdr “lm discs” discs are thicker; I don’t know what effect they might have on the sound of speaker (in my experience, the effect of adding bdr is usually good), but they would raise the speaker enough that you would probably have to re-experiment with tilt back if you were to use them (you’ll have to do that anyway - the hard balls don’t give the way the soft black ones do, so you’ll need to raise the front a hair to maintain your tilt back).

Enjoy!

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Hey Boys -

Merry Christmas! Messing around with speaker cable and wanted some input. I’ve been happily using CVT Terminator 1 biwire for almost a year without even thinking about it, but based upon comments earlier in this thread and elsewhere, I decided to experiment with single wiring using Shotgun S1 and a nice set of aq jumpers I had laying around doing nothing. Counterintuitive as it may be, I do feel like the soundstage is bigger, especially deeper, and bass is even better than it was when biwired, BUT, I’ve been driving myself nuts between the aq jumpers and the plain silver bent paper clip jumpers supplied by Totem AND, more to the point, between going with both speaker leads into the woofer inputs, jumping to the tweeter inputs (which gives me that dark sexy sound I crave), and using the totem recommended diagonal (which is clearly more accurate/better balanced, but seems to lose a little of that special “magic”). I realize I’m picking nits at this point, but as they say, the devil is in the details. I’d love to hear your experiences if you experimented with the different wiring schemes on your sigs, before I take the easy way out and just go back to biwiring.

Thanks.

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Mcfavre4 - welcome to the thread. I have quite a bit of experience with a pair of pre signature, biwire model 1s. They were my dad’s speakers and I borrowed them from him when my vandersteens went down (for the third time). My several months with the model 1s is what led me to purchase the Forest Signature - I wanted what the model 1s were doing, only more, bigger and deeper. The Forest Sigs seemed to be the perfect choice, I borrowed my dealer’s demo pair and, well, he never got them back. So from my perspective, if you like the Model 1, you will LOVE the Forest Signatures. I know that was just a generalized love letter for the Forest Sigs, so please let me know if you have a more specific question I didn’t answer.

As far as my post from yesterday, right now I have the Shotgun S1 hooked up to the woofers and the CVT Terminator 1 hooked up to the tweeters - i.e., a true bi wire configuration, taking advantage of the Plinius’ double output jacks. While I preferred single wire with jumpers to the internally biwired cable, going to a true biwire configuration was an eye opener. Everything opens up, the back wall disappears and all hint of strain or distortion just disappears (talking here about the very low level stuff that you don’t even know is there until it is gone). I’m not suggesting that it makes any sense to do what I’m doing with the level of cable I’m doing it with, it’s almost certainly overkill, but one of the benefits of being in this hobby for over 40 years is that you learn how to sniff out a keeper, so you accumulate some good stuff over time - why not put it to good use? What I am saying, and this comes right out of the vandersteen playbook, is that, in my experience, the sound you get with true biwiring is incomparably better than what you can get with the internally biwired cable to which many of us default for our biwirable speakers. Indeed, for me, in my system with the Forest Sigs, the internally biwired cable was the worst option, easily bettered by the single wire with aq jumpers, but even that delicious combo was again easily bested when I removed the jumpers and added a fully separate run of similar cable to the tweeter. Right now I’m thinking it can’t get any better.

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