Trying to hook up Totem 1 Bookshelf’s …..

No worries. Make sure you have jumpers between each set (black to black and red to red), - i believe the Model 1s come with their own wire jumpers. then connect your cables to the lower set of connectors. 

Thanks for that Simao, yes the Totems do have the jumpers…..any reason for connecting to the lower set of connectors? Curious also why each speaker has two pairs of connectors.

One pair for the tweeter and the other for the woofer. There are two pairs in case you want to biwire or biamp in which case you remove the jumpers. 

The top set connects to the tweeters; the lower to the woofers. You could run what's called a bi-wire cable (Generic Amazon set here) from your amp to the speakers after you remove the jumper cables. Opinions are divided as to whether biwiring makes a palpable sonic difference, though much more learned minds than me can weigh in on this. 

I would suggest running your normal speaker cable into the lows only because woofers are tough to drive. So.etimes I'll run one wire into the red upper and one I to the black lower. Sonic difference? Don't know.

I owned the standard and Signature version Totem Model Ones. Tried a few different connection options over the years. Here are the results of all three.

Top: with the silver jumper wires installed, connecting to the top binding posts reveals a little more of the tweeter, slightly less from the woofer.

Bottom: with the silver jumper wires installed, the tweeter is a tad more rolled off ever so slightly and lower bass comes through a tad more.

Bi-wire: jumpers removed, bi-wire speaker cables.  I was not expecting much of a difference and tried it with pure copper ofc and silver-over-copper bi wire speaker cables. Noticed a bit of reinforcement to both the mids and lows, with no loss of upper end tweeter presentation.

Preferred bi-wire speaker connectivity over any of the single wire connections.

Thanks for that decooney that’s what I was expecting based on another reply here. However, my new listening room sounds horrible as it’s barely treated yet and honestly it would be impossible to hear the difference until I’ve taken care of treating the room. Two more weeks I should be up and running with my system

and dialing everything in.

i never heard a room going from "room sounds horrible" to "great" after room treatment. If the speakers are placed correctly and you are sitting in the sweet spot, you should expect going from good to great or at most OK to great.

Unless the room is a diamond shape glass cabin.

Something else must cause it to be horrible and I know the Totem speakers are pretty awesome for small-ish rooms.

All solid information, they are correct.  

I simply pass long stripped wire ends through the drilled holes in the speaker posts and bridge the tweeter and woofer posts of each positive/negative.  No jumpers needed.  I've done this with dozens of speakers.  Best of luck.

I am beyond cheap. I just run bare wire at the end of the speaker wire on my Mani 2’s. I just have it long enough to connect the posts.

18 months late, but I’ve had biwireable Model 1’s (pre-signature) and I am currently running Forest Signatures. I have experimented with a variety of wiring options on both, from ‘true’ biwiring (separate runs for tweeter and woofer), to internal biwiring (one run of speaker cable with 4 terminations at the speaker end), to several different aftermarket jumpers, wires connected diagonally, tweeter jumped to woofer and woofer jumped to tweeter.

After much anguish and a LOT of time (not to mention $$), I decided that the FOR ME, IN MY ROOM, ON MY SYSTEM, the purest sound is obtained in the most conventional way - speaker cables connected to the woofers, using the Totem supplied jumpers. Even though they just look like bent paper clips, Vince Bruzzese told me they are in fact solid silver-plated copper, and they are intended to allow the crossover to operate as intended (unlike the cheapo brass plates included with many other biwireable speakers).

Although they look less sophisticated than some of the other options (not that anyone is looking at the back of their speakers), Vince’s explanation makes perfect sense to me - no extra connectors or dielectrics or anything else that could alter the performance of the crossover, however slightly. I imagine that the bare speaker wire through the bottom to the top option mentioned by a couple of previous posters would yield a similar result, but the way my speaker cables are finished makes that difficult, at best, so I have not tried it.

YEMV, etc.

✌🏼

yes