Totem Forest Speakers.....

I've never owned Totem loudspeakers (but have listened to them for many hrs.) nor Krell, but I will say the right amp can make a world of difference. I would suggest on a whim buy an older Marantz Reciever from 70's. I own the 2218 and I will say it has a certain warmth and musicality that is very special. I suggest a higher powered model and see what results you get driving your Forests.

My Forests sounded best about 2 feet from wall, 8-9' apart, toed in to the listening position, and mass loaded (about 50% of bottom chamber filled with small river stones -- there's another recent thread on mass loading). They also sounded better without grills, after 300+ hours of break-in and with the right cables. Ultimately prefered copper wire over silver with the Forests. Quite a few different amps of very different designs worked well with them, but they all had plenty of juice.

See if you can borrow a better source component (a Benchmark DAC-1 perhaps?) before driving yourself crazy with speaker placement. I know speaker placement is very important, but you have very high resolution electronics, speaker cables, and speakers, and a CD player that's not in the same league. Maybe the Krell/Kimber/Forest signal chain is revealing the Yamaha's shortcomings.

Your room and placement is asking for trouble--same resonating frequency for all four walls, half the wall length for the space between the speakers, and 1/4 the wall length for the space between each speaker and its wall.

You're suffering from garbage in, garbage out.
Great amp and speakers!

Matt, synergy is so so elusive. I'm still trying to capture it in my system. Source amp speaker synergy is complex or can be simple if you know of system(s) that work well and replicate that system. The Yamaha appears to be the lesser component in your system. If I were you I would look at the source first and replace it. If you then do not get what you are listening for then look at the 400xi and replace it.