![]() While the Tribe Towers deliver excellent sonics and top value for their price, this is a very important category. After a year of moving 300 and 400-pound speakers, I can’t tell you how welcome this is. Nothing like high-performance speakers that won’t break the bank or your back. Our review samples arrive in the gloss black and reveal another great surprise: these beautiful speakers only weigh about 30 pounds each – a significant bonus. Much like a cool car, they look great just standing still. The new Totem Tribe Tower tips the price scale at $5,300/pair in Satin white or black and $5,800/pair in gloss ICE (white) or DUSK (black).Perhaps it’s Bruzzese’s love of automobiles, but these speakers are finished as well as any luxury car (if not better than some) and sport a gloss and lack of orange peel that you might expect from a $100,000 pair of Wilson or Focal speakers. It’s incredible how far cone speaker design has come in 20 years or so – you no longer need a panel speaker to achieve this kind of three-dimensional presentation, only to have to compromise dynamics and impact. Staying in the Laurie Anderson groove a little longer, “Excellent Birds” (from Mister Heartbreak) combines both characteristics in one track. Switching the program to Laurie Anderson’s Live at Town Hall NYC reinforces the exceptional spatial abilities of these speakers – from the ethereal openness of Anderson’s voice to the correctness of the applause in the audience. We’ve often seen Totem use a Boulder amp in their demos, but rest assured that you’ll still get that deep bass you heard when tracking through Yello (just like you heard in the demo) with a good tube amp too. As expected, they offer slightly more slam with a big solid-state amplifier, but your personal preference will dictate what you pair your Totem Tribes with. With a 4-ohm impedance and an 89db/1-watt sensitivity, they work well with tubes or solid-state amplification. Five different amplification choices from Boulder, Nagra, Pass, PrimaLuna and VAC all deliver the goods: the highly resolving nature of the Tribe Towers quickly shows off the nuances between them all. ![]() Moving on to some more bass-heavy tracks, these speakers move serious air, regardless of their size. You can read more about the tech involved here, but it’s safe to say that Totem has succeeded brilliantly here in terms of clarity and phase accuracy. Totem has the only 4-inch woofer that is capable of a 26Hz free air resonance, and the dome tweeter goes effortlessly up to 30kHz. The tiny frontal area of the enclosures houses a 1.3-inch soft dome tweeter coupled to a pair of 4-inch Torrent drivers, which are technological marvels. These svelte speakers are instantly riveting. Listening to the deep bass line in Lyle Lovett’s “She’s Already Made up her Mind,” I’m still amazed after nearly 20 years of reviewing speakers, at how Totem’s Vince Bruzzese gets so much bass out of such small cabinets. ![]()
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