Totem Hawks - my impressions

Also owned a pair of Totem Hawk loudspeakers for a couple of years.  I thought they were good within their limits.   They struck me as a speaker better suited to acoustical music, vocals and jazz rather than rock.   With rock the woofer can be easily over driven.  Do try and use Totem Acoustic Beaks with them.  I don't get how they work but they were an upgrade for my speakers.

I’ve now owned Totem Dreamcatchers, Rainmakers and the Sky Bookshelf speakers. In my system, the Rainmakers had a lot of magic, but were easily bested by the Hawks.

What a tremendous sounding speaker. There is a sense of presence, live music, and intimacy that is so captivating. I’m running them with a 200 watt amp that could be described as nothing special(Adcom 555SE -2018 version), but don’t need to over drive them as kiwi experienced. That said, any speaker can be over driven and any 2 driver design will have limits.

Totem lists the max volume peak of the Hawks to be 107 db at 2 meters in a room of about 12 x 20’. That’s very loud, and well into hearing damage range, but if hearing damage is your thing, buy some Klipsch and knock yourself out(not directed at kiwi, but anyone who prefers ear bleeding levels!)

Anyway, the bass coming out of this smaller sized tower is exceptional. The revelator driver in the Hawk is renowned in the audio community apparently. The tweeters are so much better than the Rainmaker tweeter as well. I didn’t realize it, but the Rainmaker tweets are kind of shouty in comparison, you get more texture and imaging with the Hawk tweeters.

There is a youtube reviewer called zero fidelity that goes into great detail on the Hawks, I’d suggest the video and suggest the Hawks for the speaker short list for sure.

To say Totem is not much on rock, I must say I agree . There are made for real music . .

I wonder how the new SKY (tower and bookshelves) compare to the Hawks.. .higher level of transparency?  

The Hawks are priced above both, and I can say that at least compared to the Totem Sky, the Hawks have better imaging, more presence and detail, at least in my system.