Has anyone heard the Totem Acoustic's Wind?

If you're looking for an easy way to upgrade your Hawks, add a Totem Lightning sub. True, it won't give you any more soundstage or detail like the Wind will, but it sure does cost a lot less and gets the Hawks out of the "bookshelf" comparison area and solidly into the "full-range high performance" category.

I personally would rather go the route of a full range speaker than a speaker + subwoofer route, if music is the primary concern. Some people love their two ways so much they'll stick with them and add a sub, but imo a high quality full ranger has a coherency than subs + speakers lack. It takes experimentation to get the best integration of sub-woofer and speaker - it is possible, but is it preferable to a full range speaker, if you have the room and can spend the money? Not really.
Reality can kick in a practicality may dictate a sub, for cost, placement or even home theater integration reasons, but when it comes down to pure music, I will pick the coherence of a full range speaker anyday.

For counterpoint, once my sub was set up properly I would never go back to a system without it - only a handful of speakers sound as full as what I have now, and at that point there are cost and aesthetics starting to creep into it. IMO coherency issues are indicitave of an improperly set up system.

Sonance, I think you might change your mind if you hear a *properly* dialed in musical subwoofer from the likes of REL or Totem. I get the strange feeling your experiences have been with home-theater subs.

I agree w/ both Sonance and Ghunter.

A quality true full range speaker will be better for music than a poorly setup speakers + sub combination. However, if you're looking at subwoofers such as Velodyne's Digital Drive series, Revel B15, Ultima30, Rel Stadium, etc..., you'll see that a well placed and executed subwoofer will work as well and in most cases, better than a "full range" speakers w/o a sub.

For example, Totem Hawk + Velodyne DD12 combination will produce a very flat frequency responce from below 20Hz to 20kHz. I highly doubt you can find a true full range speakers (Wind goes down to 24Hz supposedly) that can do the same for the same price.

The important question to ask is, do you really need a truly full range (20Hz-20kHz) sound? If the answer is yes and you love the LFE on movie tracks, I think a subwoofer will make a huuuge difference in the experience and more than worth the investment.

It all comes down to personal preferences and needs, but w/ today's quality subwoofers, we really don't need to worry too much about the integration with main speakers. The subwoofer matching technology has come a long way and I believe they've gotten it right now.

Sorry to stray off the topic a bit, but for me, if I had the money, I'd add a quality subwoofer even if I had the Totem Wind loudspeakers.

Spacekadet,

There are subtleties in the musical bandwidth that are below what most so called “full-range” speakers cannot produce. What I found with most Digital Drive or Rel setups properly implemented is texture, texture, and more texture.