Knownothing,
Thanks for the good wishes! You have also given me priceless advice and counsel in this thread. I'm very grateful. The speakers should be here in about a week; the dealer had to order them.
By the way, I ended up buying them from a little dealer here in Austin called Tube Dreams. It's run by a nice guy named Simon Hill. He has a "day job" in the computer industry, but has converted his garage into a showroom and sells audio equipment (lots of pricey tube gear, along with Usher, Totem and other speakers) out of his home. I could've bought the Totems from a home theater outfit here (and they were perfectly nice) but it's clear to me that audio is a labor of love for this guy and I wanted to give him the business. He was even good enough to sweeten the deal when he saw me wavering due to price.
Mapman:
By the way, if I have any lingering regret, it's having not given the Ohm Micro Walsh Tall's a try. I would love to hear them some day (I even posted a message to our neighborhood list-serve to see if anybody knew anybody who had them) but didn't think I had the energy to bring them in, set them up, burn them in, and then deal with returning them if I didn't like them. Although I hadn't had a chance to hear the Arro, the home theater store did have the Dreamcatcher and Rainmaker, and I really liked the sound of both, so at least I had a clue of how the Arros might sound. Also, I thought my wife would like the appearance of the Totems a bit more, plus they're supposed to be very forgiving in terms of room placement. Anyway, at some point you have to make a decision, and since I still have upgrade/refurb decisions to make on my SOTA Sapphire once SOTA calls with their recommendations, I settled on Totem. It's weirdÂ… I usually am drawn to unconventional choices when it comes to buying stuff like this (heck, I had an Amiga computer for over 10 years!) but in the case of this speaker decision, I made a "more conventional" choice. Oh, well...
