Totem Acoustic is a Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-based manufacturer of loudspeaker

Loudspeaker

A loudspeaker is an electroacoustic transducer that produces sound in response to an electrical audio signal input. Non-electrical loudspeakers were developed as accessories to telephone systems, but electronic amplification by vacuum tube made loudspeakers more generally useful...

 systems.

History

Totem Acoustic was founded in 1987 by Vince Bruzzese, also the company's chief designer. The totem

Totem

A totem is a stipulated ancestor of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe.Totems support larger groups than the individual person. In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a totem...

 represents, to the native North American people, an entity that chooses an individual and then guides that person during his or her life. The name was chosen as an ongoing symbolic representation of this mission and vision. The company's mission is "to develop a totally new transducer, a loudspeaker capable of reproducing a truly musical and involving performance".

After two years of research, Totem released its first small-volume box design loudspeaker, the Model One in 1989. This was the company's only model in the early years. In 1992, the Tott, the Rokk, and the Mani-2 were launched.

Totem has continued to specialise in small box loudspeakers, of both mini-monitors and floor standing types. It also manufacturers subwoofer

Subwoofer

A subwoofer is a woofer, or a complete loudspeaker, which is dedicated to the reproduction of low-pitched audio frequencies known as the "bass". The typical frequency range for a subwoofer is about 20–200 Hz for consumer products, below 100 Hz for professional live sound, and below...

s and speaker systems for home theater

Home cinema

Home cinema, also commonly called home theater, are home entertainment set-ups that seek to reproduce a movie theater experience and mood with the help of video and audio equipment in a private home....

.

Design

Totem loudspeakers have been designed to exhibit liveliness and spaciousness of the sound of live music. This is in part attributed to the boro-silicate material (similar to that used on the space shuttle

Space Shuttle

The Space Shuttle was a manned orbital rocket and spacecraft system operated by NASA on 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The system combined rocket launch, orbital spacecraft, and re-entry spaceplane with modular add-ons...

) used to damp the insides of the cabinets, and partly due to the attention paid to the crossover components.

Sonic characteristics

Totem speakers have been widely acclaimed, particularly for their dynamics

Dynamics (music)

In music, dynamics normally refers to the volume of a sound or note, but can also refer to every aspect of the execution of a given piece, either stylistic or functional . The term is also applied to the written or printed musical notation used to indicate dynamics...

, soundstage, harmonics, neutral timbre

Timbre

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...

, and rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

.

Models

• Arro - floor-standing speaker Six Moons Review September 2004
• Sttaf - floor-standing speaker Positive feedback Review, 2003
• Hawk - floor-standing speaker
• Forest - floor-standing speaker Audiophilia Review April 1999
• Wind - floor-standing speaker AV Mentor Review April 1999
• Mite - miniature bookshelf speaker
• Model 1
• Mani 2 - isobaric
  Isobaric speakers
  The Isobaric loudspeaker construction technique was originally introduced by Harry F. Olson in the early 1950s. It is derived from the term Isobar, which is of Greek origin: "isobares" meaning "of equal weight"...
  
  bookshelf speaker Stereophile Review, 1996
• Dreamcatcher Monitors Home theater magazine review, February 2002
• Storm - Subwoofer
• Thunder - Subwoofer
• Lightning
• Shaman - floor-standing speaker
• Rainmaker - bookshelf speaker Stereophile Review, November, 2004