Throughout my visit, I was impressed with the attention Vince pays to every aspect of his speaker designs. Here in the test lab, he tests drive-units and crossover components with the goal of using the best or perhaps the most appropriate for each model, regardless of price. Rather than using a single, large capacitor, he will use three of differing electrical properties to optimize the performance. The same thing goes for with resistors, where he will perhaps use an oldfashioned carbon type if it sounds better in-circuit than a modern type. Note the familiar DRA Labs MLSSA screen on the PC in the background. Vince performs nearfield measurements in this room, but for farfield measurements he uses an anechoic chamber housed in an adjacent building that was recently purchased by Totem.

Interestingly, he does much of his auditioning of a new design in mono, feeling that if a single speaker sounds acceptably good no matter you place it it the room, a stereo pair will then take that fundamentally good performance to the next level. But if it doesn't work well in mono, using it in stereo performance will be just a Band-Aid.