Aktchi, Tvad,
I thoroughly understand your point, and it's certainly something that I thought about. Did I really give the Arro's a fair shake?
Here's the thing: the Arro was kind of stressing me out. If I sat in exactly the right spot and had my head, within a few inches, in exactly the right spot, then I could begin to hear what they are capable of doing. But you know, although I used to listen to music that way when I first got into high-end audio back in the mid-1980s (move the left speaker a quarter of an inch one way, toe in the right speaker 10° the other way...) I don't listen to music that way anymore. I just want to enjoy it. That doesn't mean that I have totally lost touch with my geek side: next week, I'm going to begin to build Bottlehead Seduction phono pre-amp kit! And granted, I am sure that the Totems would continue to improve over time.
But after playing with the Arro (even in 10 hours of listening, you can do quite a bit of futzing around) and even after realizing that tilting the speakers back a few degrees improved their sound, I hit my "life's too short for this" threshold.
I am married and have a small child. Furthermore, my listening room is right below my wife's home office. And I have a full-time job. The result of all of this is that my listening time is limited and very precious, and the thought of how long it would actually take me to get to a hundred hours of usage on those speakers so that I could THEN begin to make a serious comparison with the Ohm's, is just overwhelming. In the limited time that I have to listen to music, I want to be relaxing and enjoying music, and not involved in a cognitive exercise of evaluating one speaker against another.
The thing is,the Ohm Micro Walsh Talls, with a little bit of work positioning the speakers optimally, sound much more pleasing to me "out-of-the-box" than did the Totems, and I have no reason to doubt the the MWT's will continue to improve with time. I find their presentation so seductive and pleasing that they make the want to sit down and listen to music for hours on end, without having to do a lot of futzing positioning and so forth.
So yes, I understand that I may have flushed a few hundred dollars down the toilet, but it's one of those "chalk it up to experience" things. Somebody else will get a good break on the Totem, and, good for them!
