Robert Deutsch

Are there too many audio shows? With the Chicago AXPONA having been held two weeks ago, the Montreal SSI having just concluded, and the New York Audio Show coming up in what their website currently indicates is 16 days, 21 hours, 51 minutes, and 9 seconds away, people are starting to wonder whether we're getting an overload on audio shows. This is a sentiment that I've heard expressed by manufacturers and distributors—and, from the business point of view, their concerns are well founded. Participating in shows is an expensive endeavor, and the benefits in terms of additional business, while real, are difficult to measure.

Perhaps the most unusual speaker at Toronto Audiofest 2018 was Bryston's whimsically-named T-Rex Model T. It's a stacked pair of Model Ts, the top speaker upside down. I was reminded of the Double Advent system popular in the 1970s, but the T-Rex goes well beyond the Double Advent, with substantial bracing joining the speakers, a layer of rubber between them, and Bryston's DAX-1 digital crossover included. The total price is $18,000/pair (unless otherwise noted, all prices in this report are CN$), which represents something of a bargain for all this hardware.

Toronto is turning into a happening place for audiophiles. The Toronto Audio Visual Entertainment Show being held October31–November 2, 2014, promises to be bigger and better in their new venue at the Sheraton Centre Hotel downtown. The Update TV & Stereo Elevated store, with a strong high-performance audio orientation, opened last spring in the Toronto suburb of Unionville. And now, Angie's Audio Corner, devoted to high end celebrated its second anniversary with the opening of the Annex Clearance Center in the coach house next to the main building, acting as a clearing house for used equipment of all sorts and used LPs.

There’s a kind of hierarchy of prestige among speaker manufacturers (which may or may not have anything to do with the sound quality of their offerings). At the bottom you have manufacturers that use off-the-shelf drivers which are available to any hobbyist, and don’t do anything other than mount these speakers in an enclosure and connect the drivers to a crossover (which may also be an off-the-shelf unit). Then you have manufacturers that start off with an off-the-shelf unit but modify this unit to their purposes. (The modification can be as simple as adding a bit of mass to the cone or adding a foam ring around the tweeter cone.) The next higher level in the hierarchy are speaker manufacturers that have the drivers made to their specifications by a specialist manufacturer of speaker drivers. And at the very top of the hierarchy are the speaker manufacturers that make their own drivers. This allows them to not only control of every step of the manufacturing process but also the ability produce drivers that are proprietary.

It is this top level of speaker manufacturer hierarchy that Totem has reached with the new Element series, shown in JA's photo with designer Vince Bruzzese. The 7” woofers used in the Element Series are of the Canadian’s company’s own design, manufactured in-house, which requires three hours of machining and more than four hours of assembly. I don’t know enough about loudspeaker driver design to talk with any authority about how the new Totem woofer differs from other woofer designs (the magnetic design was inspired by something called the Halbach array); suffice it to say that it has a free-air resonance of 16–17Hz, and its mechanical top end frequency rolloff is such that it’s matched with the tweeter without any crossover components in the woofer path. The top-of-the-line Metal ($12,995/pair) sounded good in a brief listen. I look forward to having more of an opportunity to listen to these new Totems at the 2011 Montreal show.