Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site


In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: A quest for a better monitor.
Post Subject: The Totem Mani-2 anti-monitorsPosted by Romy the Cat on: 6/14/2006

Yes, you are correct. The UHF are pro Canadian people and they do have the Canadian bias. Interestingly that the Canadian audio generally has very Canadian bias as well. It is very unfortunate as I always thought that bias should be for better Sound instead of a patriotic self-encapsulation….

Anyhow, the Totem Mani-2 is exactly my vision of a "stupid anti-monitor".  It uses a par of one-behind-another-sitting Dynaudio 17W75XL drivers along some other solutions to push more bass out of this mini-monitor. This is exactly what I call VERY wrong objectives. The Totem Mani-2 does impressive "sonic boom" that make fools to believe that these mini-monitors are "always a full range speakers". It is good for marketing and sale but it has nothing to do with the realty of sound. Those Dynaudio drivers are deadly like a bite of a rattlesnake and the bass that Totem dose is completely not useable. If people want to play the freak-show games, trying to get "big sound" from small monitors then Bose did much better job for a fraction of the price.

Still, the two biggest strategic mistakes that Totem did fundamentally wrong in Mani-2:

1) A ported enclosure made the Mani-2 not-integrateable with any possible complimentary LF section.
2) A monitor is JUST MF channel. Do NOT make a monitor to produce bass as you would be forced to use wrong drivers and wrong solutions to accomplish the wrong thighs.

As the result, instead of going for transients, dynamics, sensitively, tone and quality of sound the Totem went for creation of "farts producing monitors". I’m sure that the audio propaganda cretins had a lot of writing to do to demonstrate that they were “bass-impressed”, but it has little to do with servicing the interest of Sound.

The Cat

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site