Hello, first post on this forum. I have a pair of Totem Staff tower speakers and am guessing they are from the late 90s/early 00s. I am generally happy with the sound but am tempted to tinker. There is sand in the mass loading chamber in the bottom, but the inside does not have any polyfil or foam on the inside. I have seen some talk about a special dampening paint or coating but mine don't appear to have that on the inside. Anyone have any experiences with adding fill or foam to the inside of Totem speakers. Not sure if it would be reasonable to add either given the compact nature of the cabinets.
The midrange on these speakers does not seem very prevalent and the frequency response (the blue line is from a sub) seems to confirm my suspicion.
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Has anyone modified the crossover for this speaker? Not wanting to open a can of worms about a specific company who offers upgraded crossovers, but rather personal experiences with such an upgrade.
Sorry I missed this when you originally posted, as I've got a fair bit of experience here. The Totem speaker Amir refers to was mine, and I've built speakers using the same drivers and similar cabinets to Totem but with my own crossovers, and done extensive mods on Totem Forest speakers.
The Forests are much better speakers than the Sttafs and one of the few Totem speakers with relatively balanced sound. Still, mods did make an improvement. I duplicated the look of the Model 1 and Signature One speakers as well to use as my centre and rears, using the same Seas tweeters and HiVi drivers but with my own crossover designs, and I'd take them over the Totem originals any day of the week.
As Amir says, the easiest thing to do here is just replace the speakers outright. However, Totems are beautiful
looking speakers, the cabinets are usually well made, and they typically use good-quality components, the issues are in the idiosyncrasies of the designer and you can compensate for these if you feel like doing some modding.
Yes, adding fill will likely help,
a little. It will not fix most of the midrange issues though.
The best thing you can do is bypass/remove the crossover and replace with an active unit, like a Dayton 408 or Behringer Ultradrive. You need to have pre-outs and four channels of amplification though.
If you've got a good measurement mic and crossover design software, you could also replace the crossover if you were so inclined, and are pretty much guaranteed to be able to improve on the Totem original. As Amir notes, Totems often don't properly attenuate the high frequencies going to the woofer, and also do not properly level match the woofer and the tweeter (in the case of my Totem Rainmaker, a properly-designed crossover would attenuate the tweeter by around 8dB. The Totem crossover has no attenuation at all).
This is all a lot of work though, so only do it if you think it would be fun and a good learning experience. If you just want better sound, buy better speakers. I used to sell the Sttaf and other Totem speakers back in 2005-2007 and the only Totems that ever impressed me much were the Hawk and Forest. I don't really have strong memories of the Sttaf, but the Mite, the bookshelf version using the same woofer and tweeter, was one of the worst-sounding "real" speakers I've ever heard.
