In a recent episode of Audio Unleashed, my cohost Brent Butterworth—friend of the SoundStage! Network and former SoundStage! Solo editor—said something that’s been living rent-free in my head ever since: “Audio reviewers, you and I included, have egos, and . . . as much as you and I try to resist this, we . . . often try to confirm our existing beliefs.” The reason I’m bringing this up is that, unbeknownst to Brent, he uttered those words when I was smack-dab in the middle of writing a review of Totem’s new Loon Monitor standmount loudspeaker ($1299/pair, all prices USD) and struggling with it to a degree. Because the Loon seems to intentionally rebel against a lot of what I look for in a speaker, and I’ve been grappling for weeks with how best to communicate my honest feelings about how this speaker does sound, detached from all the baggage related to my thoughts on how speakers should sound.
If any of the above is more than you care to untangle, let me speak more plainly. Totem Acoustic has a reputation for not having a particular house sound, and for designing speakers that don’t necessarily align with the philosophies employed by many of their Canadian speaker-manufacturing brethren. But a lot of people I know and trust—including many an avowed objectivist—really dig them. So, as I said in my unboxing blog post, I went into this review a tangled knot of mixed emotions and anxiety.
But straight out of the box, the little Loon is immediately disarming. The newest and most affordable member of the Totem family, it boasts incredible craftsmanship, from the gorgeous real-wood veneers (black walnut in the case of my review samples) and the lock-mitered construction of the cabinet to the elegant simplicity of the design itself. The Loon measures just 10.75″H × 6″W × 8″D (without grille) and weighs 8.5 pounds, and yet it boasts low-frequency extension down to 51Hz (-3dB).
More importantly to me, the Loon is hand-crafted in North America—Canada, specifically. Given that, the value proposition is even higher than it appears at first glance.
The speaker is a two-way ported design with a 1″ soft-dome tweeter and a 5.75″ woofer with a copper-clad voice coil. The crossover between the two drivers is at 2.5kHz, with first-order slopes. The company says that, in addition to working wonderfully as a nearfield monitor, the Loon is designed to work well as rear speakers in a surround setup with any of the company’s Bison speakers serving as front channels. I haven’t heard any of those, but our founder, Doug Schneider, reviewed and quite liked the Bison Twin Tower, so be sure to head over to SoundStage! Hi-Fi and check out his full review.
Setting up and dialing in the Totem Loon
Totem’s recommendations for placement of the Loon allow for a distance to the back wall of anywhere between 6″ and 3′. I planned on spending a good bit of time dialing in that forward/backward placement, as I usually do with speakers this small—especially rear-ported ones. But when I removed my reference Paradigm Studio 100 v.5 tower speakers from my listening room, plopped my Monoprice Monolith speaker stands in their place, and plonked the Loons atop those stands, I ended up with a distance of 14″ from the port to the bookshelf behind, and some decent scootching forwards and back didn’t have an appreciable difference in the level and character of the bass, so I left them there.
With those stands, the Loons’ tweeters ended up at right around 40.5″ off the floor, a little lower than my ear level. A Totem representative told me ahead of time that would be perfectly fine, but the company’s setup guide recommends placement at ear level or above, so I also used some monitor isolation pads to bring them up a little. It honestly didn’t make much difference. Vertical dispersion of the speaker was obviously quite good, and placement was as easy and unfussy as any speaker I’ve reviewed in recent years.
For the duration of the review, I used my NAD C 3050 integrated amplifier, connected to the speakers via a pair of pre-terminated Elac Sensible speaker cables. The banana plugs fit the Loons’ binding posts perfectly, and the rubber plugs that come installed in the binding posts were easy to remove but did require some intentionality. They’re not going to fall out unprompted, but neither are you going to ruin your last manicure getting them out. I like that a lot.
For much of the review, I ran the Loons paired with an SVS PB-1000 Pro subwoofer to extend the lower octaves. Integration required exactly zero effort. I set an 80Hz crossover point out of habit and found no reason to tinker any further, so seamless was the blend between them.
I did play around with running the Loons full-range for a bit, and found them to be perfectly up to the task in limited use-case scenarios. If using them in a desktop nearfield system, for example, I could totally live with these things without a sub, given that you really do get usable bass extension down into the 50s.
On the other hand, get them up to satisfying listening levels from more than, say, 30″ away, and suddenly you can hear some appreciable chuffing with certain music once you get below 75Hz or thereabouts (the frequency where it becomes apparent depends on the music and the listening level, but 75-ish Hz was a good average).
So, yeah, that 80Hz crossover point ended up being ideal.
How does the Loon Monitor perform?
Getting back to that rambling point I was attempting to make in the intro: Give me a speaker with its own distinctive voicing, and my impulse is to immediately try to demonstrate why tonally colored speakers are bad. And I know this might be controversial, but one of my go-to tracks for demonstrating precisely why is “Radio Ga Ga” from Queen’s The Works (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Hollywood Records / Qobuz). I call this song a canary in a coalmine, because once you start playing with the relative balance of different frequencies, this fun ditty can become unlistenable really quick, sending Freddie Mercury’s voice into a roller-coaster that results in him sounding somehow simultaneously buried in the mix and strident, recessed, and overly sibilant—depending on the frequencies being boosted and cut, of course.
It’s been my experience that every idiosyncratic speaker sounds off in its own way with this song, whatever you think of its audiophile bona fides. What I wasn’t expecting was to listen to the Loons’ delivery of the song and say to myself, “Self, that sounds different, but I kinda love it.” Frankly, it sounded like a valid remaster of the tune. Yes, the proportions were off a little in places. The Linn LM-1 Drum Computer employed to create the track’s iconic beat was a little too bright for my liking. But on the whole, I really enjoyed the energy and intensity of the experience.
So let’s talk specifics. What do I consider “off a little in places”? Well, fast-forward to around the 3:32 mark. The “All we hear is radio ga ga, radio goo goo, radio ga ga” chorus is mostly sans instrumentation. Through the Loons, Brian May’s and Roger Taylor’s backing vocals took a big backseat to Freddie’s, to the point where I could easily overlook the fact that they’re in the mix at all. Quickly switching over to my Paradigms and trying to level-match as best as possible, I heard Brian and Rog return to their proper place in the mix. When I switched back to the Totems, they stepped away from the mike a couple of feet again.
I’m inclined to dislike that sort of thing. I want my music to sound like my music. But there’s an effect that comes from listening to the Loons that I’m sure you’re familiar with—I heard stuff I don’t normally hear, which drew me deeper into the music. What’s more, when I turned off my analytical mind and just listened, I ended up having a stupid amount of fun, which is something I typically can’t do with speakers that have a lot of their own personality. And if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because the Loons got the bass right in a way a lot of speakers this size don’t. Once I had the speakers and sub dialed in, the line between them became practically inaudible, which is a feat I’ve struggled to accomplish with much larger bookshelf speakers.
What also struck me was the delightful image specificity I was hearing. The Loons locked vocals tightly in the center and placed instrumentation—even electronic instrumentation of the sort on display here—precisely in the soundstage. I can only assume that tolerances on these things—in other words, the variation or lack thereof between the two cabinets—is incredible. My review samples sported sequential serial numbers, so I’m guessing speaker matching is a rigorous part of the Totem QA process. I could have asked, but I wanted to avoid having much discussion with the company while nitpicking its product.
“Radio Ga Ga” is a worst-case-scenario track for me. While it’s a great canary in the coalmine, it’s not a very surgical analytical tool. So I switched over to something a bit more organic, a lot more singer-songwritery, and something with which I’m a lot more familiar: Thomas Dybdahl’s “Adelaide,” from the brilliant . . . . That Great October Sound (16/44.1 FLAC, V2 Records Benelux / Qobuz). I picked that song because it’s not the easiest mix to get right. It’s a duet between Dybdahl and (I believe) Norwegian actress and musician Silje Salomonsen, whose voice has a very different range from his. And, indeed, Salomonsen gets a little overpowered by Dybdahl here.
Interestingly, though, through the Loons, Ådne Sæverud’s Hammond organ stepped a little forward in the mix, as did the little percussive elements peppered throughout the track, which I really loved, and which grabbed my attention time and again.
The more natural tonal balance of this track, as compared with the Queen, also gave me the chance to start pinpointing the Loon’s deviations from true neutrality, and although sorting this thing out by ear can be a sticky wicket—our brains, after all, can’t easily discriminate between “too much bass” and “too little treble”—what I subjectively heard was a bit of a lean-back somewhere between 400 and 500Hz, along with some politeness in the neighborhood of 2000 to 3000Hz. Could there have been some additions somewhere else that made me incorrectly perceive these subtractions? Maybe. But that’s what I ended up hearing.
Those observations held true when I switched my attentions to Hania Rani’s new album, Nostalgia, specifically the title track, “Nostalgia (Live at Roundhouse, London)” (24/96 FLAC, Gondwana Records / Qobuz). But there was something else I couldn’t quite put nearly as specific a finger on. Somewhere between 5000 and 10,000Hz, my brain perceived a bit of reduced energy that resulted in some taming of the room sound. Interestingly, though, none of these tonal deviations did anything to diminish the beauty of Rani’s piano playing—which is odd, given that the piano can be one of the most difficult instruments to convincingly reproduce.
This track is another one that shined a spotlight on the Loons’ incredible imaging and wonderfully deep soundstage. Horizontal dispersion was fantastic, vertical dispersion was really darned good, and it deserves to be said again: the consistency from speaker to speaker was so bang-on that image specificity was a little scary at times.
So again, I keep going back to the same conclusion: Yes, the Loons made things sound a little different. But I almost always loved the sound, and found it to be within the bounds of what I would consider a valid remaster (not a remix, by the way—the differences made by the Loon are nowhere near as drastic as, for example, the hatchet job Giles Martin recently did on Revolver).
So take that for what you will. When it comes down to it, the thing that really matters is whether you like the sound of a speaker or not. And yes, we know for a fact that a speaker designed based on the principles uncovered at Canada’s National Research Council ages ago will be preferred by most people. But, of course, none of that research dictated that a speaker with its own character would be disliked. Far from it.
So the bottom line for me is that I loved the little Loons despite myself, and if you find yourself bored with neutrality—and I see comments from people all the time expressing that sentiment—I think you’ll also stand a good chance of loving this fun little speaker. Not that it’s that far off from neutral. Far less than most headphones, for what it’s worth. But it’s just distinctive enough to make you sit up and take notice.
And, most importantly, it gets the essential stuff right: good crossover design, great bass, amazing imaging, holographic soundstage.
What similar bookshelf speakers should you consider?
You can get a lot of speaker for $1299 these days, especially in the bookshelf subcategory. So if this is your budget, you’ve got some decisions to make. Are you looking for something a bit more neutral? You might want to check out the KEF Q Concerto Meta ($1299/pair), which is actually a three-way design. While I don’t have hands-on with a pair of these guys yet, we should have review samples coming in the next few months. A quick look at photos reveals that the cabinetwork and veneers aren’t quite as nice as what you get with the Totem Loon, and it’s a much larger speaker, coming in at 16.3″H × 8.3″W. But it should be more neutral overall.
If you want to spend a little more or a little less, you might also want to check out the Monitor Audio Silver 50 7G ($1150/pair) or Silver 100 7G ($1495/pair). Both are, of course, siblings of the Silver 300 7G, which is by far my favorite speaker of all those I’ve reviewed for SoundStage! Access to date. The 50 is closer in size and specification to the Totem, with its 5.25″ woofer and its similar crossover, bass extension, and power-handling specs. The 100 is also a two-way ported design, but with an 8″ woofer, deeper bass extension, and significantly higher minimum impedance, which might make it easier to drive.
TL;DR: Should you buy the Totem Loon?
As always, the question isn’t whether the Loon is a good speaker, but rather for whom it might be the right speaker. I mean, yes, it is a good speaker. It’s well-designed, well-made, and utterly stunning, regardless of price. The price just so happens to be a lot lower than you might expect.
As for whom it’s right for, I’d probably recommend it to my friends who want a good hi-fi desktop audio system but are looking to explore a little in terms of sonic signatures. Words can only do so much in scenarios like this, and I’d hate to leave you with the wrong impression here. The Loon Monitor isn’t some wacky my-fi-sounding thing that only works with carefully curated, audiophile-approved DAT recordings of Norwegian nudists singing along to the mating calls of muskoxen. It’s not that distinctive. But as I’ve indicated at several points here, it does tweak the sound of your favorite music. It might bring percussion a little forward. It might massage the relative balance of the voices in a duet. It might also play around some with the frequencies that contribute to the recording but not necessarily the music, if that makes sense. If that’s what you’re chasing, Totem Acoustic’s Loon Monitor is a great place to start exploring, because it’s gorgeous and affordable and takes up almost no space at all.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Integrated amplifier: NAD C 3050 BluOS-D
- Speaker cables: Elac Sensible
- Turntable: U-Turn Audio Orbit Theory with Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge
- Power conditioner: SurgeX XR115
- Subwoofer: SVS PB-1000 Pro
Totem Acoustic Loon Monitor loudspeaker
Price: $1299/pair
Warranty: Five years, parts and labor
Totem Acoustic
9165 Champ d’Eau
St-Léonard, QC
H1P 3M3
Canada
Website: www.totemacoustic.com
