Totem Acoustic Forest Signatures

Hey Boys -

Merry Christmas! Messing around with speaker cable and wanted some input. I’ve been happily using CVT Terminator 1 biwire for almost a year without even thinking about it, but based upon comments earlier in this thread and elsewhere, I decided to experiment with single wiring using Shotgun S1 and a nice set of aq jumpers I had laying around doing nothing. Counterintuitive as it may be, I do feel like the soundstage is bigger, especially deeper, and bass is even better than it was when biwired, BUT, I’ve been driving myself nuts between the aq jumpers and the plain silver bent paper clip jumpers supplied by Totem AND, more to the point, between going with both speaker leads into the woofer inputs, jumping to the tweeter inputs (which gives me that dark sexy sound I crave), and using the totem recommended diagonal (which is clearly more accurate/better balanced, but seems to lose a little of that special “magic”). I realize I’m picking nits at this point, but as they say, the devil is in the details. I’d love to hear your experiences if you experimented with the different wiring schemes on your sigs, before I take the easy way out and just go back to biwiring.

Thanks.

NSC

Mcfavre4 - welcome to the thread. I have quite a bit of experience with a pair of pre signature, biwire model 1s. They were my dad’s speakers and I borrowed them from him when my vandersteens went down (for the third time). My several months with the model 1s is what led me to purchase the Forest Signature - I wanted what the model 1s were doing, only more, bigger and deeper. The Forest Sigs seemed to be the perfect choice, I borrowed my dealer’s demo pair and, well, he never got them back. So from my perspective, if you like the Model 1, you will LOVE the Forest Signatures. I know that was just a generalized love letter for the Forest Sigs, so please let me know if you have a more specific question I didn’t answer.

As far as my post from yesterday, right now I have the Shotgun S1 hooked up to the woofers and the CVT Terminator 1 hooked up to the tweeters - i.e., a true bi wire configuration, taking advantage of the Plinius’ double output jacks. While I preferred single wire with jumpers to the internally biwired cable, going to a true biwire configuration was an eye opener. Everything opens up, the back wall disappears and all hint of strain or distortion just disappears (talking here about the very low level stuff that you don’t even know is there until it is gone). I’m not suggesting that it makes any sense to do what I’m doing with the level of cable I’m doing it with, it’s almost certainly overkill, but one of the benefits of being in this hobby for over 40 years is that you learn how to sniff out a keeper, so you accumulate some good stuff over time - why not put it to good use? What I am saying, and this comes right out of the vandersteen playbook, is that, in my experience, the sound you get with true biwiring is incomparably better than what you can get with the internally biwired cable to which many of us default for our biwirable speakers. Indeed, for me, in my system with the Forest Sigs, the internally biwired cable was the worst option, easily bettered by the single wire with aq jumpers, but even that delicious combo was again easily bested when I removed the jumpers and added a fully separate run of similar cable to the tweeter. Right now I’m thinking it can’t get any better.

NSC

Audiophile...heal thy self!  Good job answering your own question NSC   BREAKING IN A NEW PC!!!  Anticables Reference...sounds very sexy and warm on my Krell Vanguard.  Don’t think I could stand a more Class A sound than what I’m hearing now.

I've owned the Mani-2s for years and love them.  The base extension and detail is great.  The buying decision at the time came down to Mani-2s and the Forest and the decision was a no brainer.  I recently demoed Mani-2s next to the Forest Signatures at local dealer and there is a stark difference in base extension, detail and sound stage.  I had to pull the trigger and now own both.  Both are power hungry and the Krells and Mac tubes are up to the challenge.