Totem Bison Twin Tower Floor-standing Speakers Review.

The Totem Bison Twin Tower speakers give the listener a lively and engaging sound thanks to some very serious thinking, craftsmanship, and material science.

The Bison Twin Towers are ported 2-way floor-standing speakers assembled in Canada by Totem Acoustics. They are at the top of Totem’s new Bison line, which also includes bookshelf and home theater center-channel speakers. The Bison Twin Towers feature two 5.25-inch woofers and a single 1.3-inch tweeter. Both of the woofers work in the same frequency domain, a quality unique in this category. Those woofers, in addition to hard-wired crossover assemblies, carefully designed and unique drivers, and beautiful Canadian cabinetry combine into a floor-standing speaker whose sound quality is fast, articulate, and good at portraying a deep and wide soundstage. Their MSRP is $4,000 per pair.

The Totem Bison Twin Tower speakers are available in Black Ash, Satin White, and White Oak finishes, and each finish includes magnetic grilles; you get black grilles with the Black Ash and White Oak finishes, and white grilles with the Satin White finish. My review pair are in the Black Ash finish. The wood grain is apparent and catches the light nicely, and their presentation is stately and elegant.

In each Totem Bison Twin Tower speaker is one 1.3-inch laser-etched textile soft dome tweeter, and a pair of 5.25-inch copper-clad voice coil woofers, with an overall 4-Ohm impedance and 90dB sensitivity. Each driver is proprietary in design, engineered by Totem, and then manufactured to the strictest standards to meet their parameters by the finest raw driver suppliers in the world. In some cases, if the technology is beyond the capabilities of suppliers or is wished to be kept secret, Totem can and will build its own drivers. Every one of their drivers exhibits phase linearity, speed, emotion, off-axis natural presentation, and spatial articulation.

All three drivers are controlled by handmade crossovers and there is no crossover interaction between the two bass drivers whatsoever. Totem’s crossovers aren’t built on printed circuit boards because laminated conductive tracks are weak and inconsistent. Instead, they are secured to a thin piece of fiberboard or insulated polymers, and the components are mechanically crimped together because the folks at Totem believe it simply sounds better. And if solder is required, WBT Silver Solder, the purest in the industry, is what they use.

Each speaker features a set of two pairs of high-conductivity, gold-plated connectors to allow traditional, bi-wire, or bi-amplification options. The connectors will accommodate a variety of connection options, such as bare wire, banana plugs, and spades.

Each Totem Bison Twin Tower speaker also has three exclusive Delrin decoupling Claws acting as feet on the bottom. The Claws are composed of a high-density machined Delrin composite that succeeds in breaking up standing waves and controlling surface resonance, tightening bass, and heightening the soundstage. Also, each Claw is fitted with 0.25-inch, 20-thread inserts to accommodate optional spikes, which are not included. Note that the Bison Towers were voiced with the Claw feet as is, without spikes, which are not needed or recommended.

The inserts are made available should the rare need for a spike arise, as on thick carpet to add stability.

The speakers’ cabinets are crafted by hand for peak performance to last decades. Lock-Miter assembly is an intricate woodworking procedure where edges physically interlock together. The resulting cabinet is up to five times stronger than conventional V Groove cabinets. Internal and external veneering resists warping, structurally fortifies and ensures consistent peak performance. Industry-unique Borosilicate damping manages dissipation, keeps the cabinet musically alive, and never deteriorates. This is one reason why Totem does not use popular materials commonly used in speaker design, such as poly fillers because they will eventually decay which can dramatically affect speaker performance over time. Variable Density Fiberboard, which is denser at the extremities than at the interior to reduce repetitive nodes and resonances, is also used.

For the testing of the speakers, I used an Orchard Audio Starkrimson Stereo Ultra amplifier and a Schiit Audio Freya+ preamp. I ran the Freya+ in its passive mode during the comparisons to remove as much coloration as possible from the sound. I used a bi-wire configuration with each of the amps I used to power the Totem Bison Twin Tower speakers.

The Starkrimson Stereo Ultra amplifier can produce 300W into a 4-Ohm load, so it generates more than enough power for the Totems, whose recommended power range is 20W to 200W. As I described in the review of that amplifier, the Starkrimson has an uncanny ability to portray a wide range of microdetail in recordings, and this quality was readily apparent with the Bison Twin Tower speakers. All the low-level detail the Starkrimson is capable of reproducing made it out of the Totems. As a matter of fact, I believe the Totems gave me more low- level detail than my Polk Audio Legacy L600 speakers did.

With 90db efficiency, you should be able to drive the Bison Twin Tower speakers with a wide variety of amplifiers. To test that, I also powered them with my McIntosh MC2505, which is a 50W solid-state amp sold in 1977. That amp produced more than enough power for the Totems, and even though the McIntosh amplifier added its characteristic warmth to the music and gave up some of the low-level detail, the Bison Twin Towers still made beautiful music with plenty of punch and dynamics.

The review pair of Totem speakers I received had about eighty hours of use on them when I received them. When I first put them in my system, they imaged well, but I could not get them to disappear completely. Experimenting with different positions with regard to walls and corners did not solve this problem. But I decided to break them in further by playing ambient music non-stop for a solid week. I then sat down for some serious listening, and they had clearly improved. The sound quality, and soundstage, had “bloomed.” I heard a bigger and wider soundstage and better spatial placement of singers and instruments after they had over 250 hours on them. This led me to experiment with positioning again, and I heard a considerable improvement in every quality of the speaker after the break-in. I ended up placing them eighteen inches away from the wall corners, slightly toed in toward my listening position, and they now disappeared completely into the soundstage. An impressive improvement, as far as I’m concerned.

These speakers are surprisingly light, which makes it easy to move them around. Their light weight really does belie their sound quality. I really am surprised at the amount of bass, and the quality of that bass, that these relatively lightweight speakers can produce. I think that is a testament to the excellent craftsmanship and quality of materials that go into these speakers.

Words that frequently came to mind when I was listening to the Totems were “coherent,” “musical,” “articulate,” and “non-fatiguing.” If my Polk Audio Legacy L600 speakers are hockey players, the Totems are figure skaters; they are faster, more elegant, more lithe, and more graceful.

At no time did my ears or brain ever tire of the music being played by these speakers; it was all enjoyment all the time. There is such a musical coherence and correctness to the music when played through these speakers that my ears simply heard music. I never had to expend any extra or unnecessary brainpower to get the music to make sense to me, either because of deficiencies in the frequency ranges or lack of integration between the drivers. And that made listening to music all the more easy and rewarding.

I am interested in the accurate reproduction of distortion in a recording; when I know there is distortion, and I know just how distorted the original sounds on the recording are, I want to hear if the speakers are adding any distortion to that distortion, or if they are portraying the distortion accurately. I know, kinda weird, but a fair amount of the music I listen to is not mellifluous or pretty, and I do not want my speakers affecting the experience of the music. The Totem Bison Twin Tower speakers got out of the way and did not impose themselves, and that is exactly what I wanted.

$4,000 is a lot of money for a pair of speakers for a lot of people, but I believe the Totem Bison Twin Towers will give you more than what you paid for and will reward you for continued listening in the long run. They will give you articulate, coherent, and engaging sound in a well-crafted and attractive enclosure.

The Totem Bison Twin Towers surprised me with their articulate and powerful sound. It really was a much better-quality sound than I would have suspected from such a relatively plain-looking speaker. But that’s on me, and that’s what I get for judging a book by its cover. What was not readily apparent to me was how well the cabinets were constructed, with quality material and artisanal assembly. A lot of very serious thinking, craftsmanship, and material science went into designing and building these speakers, and I heard those as soon as I played music through them. And they only got better the longer I listened to them.