Taking Suggestions for New Speaker Cables

I have to agree with Mcgal, spending up to a thousand dollars on speakers that are in the price category of the Totems is not money well allocated. In my experience, there are fewer significant differences among well designed speaker cables than about any other item in your audio chain. I'd save my money and buy better speakers, your amplification is of fine quality and the speaker upgrade will potentially reward you much more than new speaker cables. I'd also take all advice about speaker cables with large grains of salt, what works for another system may be irrelevant in your system. One of the cables being touted by another member in this thread was so breathtakingly mediocre in a previous system I owned I would have gotten as good a value throwing money down a hole. Luckily, they were easily resold. If you do end up buying cables, buy a well known and respected cable that you can try for yourself and resell for little if any loss if it doesn't work out.

I disagree with some of the above. No reason not to give the Totems the best cable they can sound right with. That does not have anything to do with the price though. Just what mates succesfully. How about "The Cable Company"? You can audition cables and apply the charges to your final purchase. Good way to get the best value for your money. If I was buying sight unseen (sound unheard?)I would go straight to Grover Hufman's website for his handmade cables.

I would suggest to listen to some Audioquest cables. Look for those who have DBS72v. The difference between MIT and Audioquest has become huge. With different clients I had superior results with Audioquest against MIT cables. MIT needs to do a lot of research to catch up.

FWIW FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:

I've had both the ARROs and FORESTs in a prior system.
I swapped in and out many different speaker cables and I settled on three listed below (in descending order of preference)

(1) TOTEMs own "SINEW" cables + ATLAS ASCENT 3.0 cables bi-amped:
The SINEW are silver plated copper. Most if not all of the TOTEMs are internally wired these.( = synergy!) I had them to the tweeters with heavier gauge ATLAS ASCENT 3.0 to the woofers .

(2) TOTEMs own SINEW bi-wired

(3) CHORD Oddyssey bi-wired or bi-amped.

The SINEW and CHORD are very similar in both construction and in performance with silver plated copper cable.

I found the TOTEMs to be "picky" in favour of silver plated copper speaker cables and also to the ICs. I ran them with matched ATLAS NAVIGATOR all_cu ICs.

What the heck, try some Tempo Electric speaker cables. If you go with bare wire ends, it'll cost you less than half your budget. They are .9999 silver, soft annealed and I couldn't be happier with mine, so there.

All the best,
Nonoise