RENDEZVOUS

THE TOTEM MAN

he first time we ever met Vince

say that we encouraged him to persevere,

Bruzzese he was showing a

and the rest is history: the tiny “overpriced”

prototype of a very small speaker

speaker turned out to be the Totem Model

with what seemed at the time

One, arguably the world’s most successful

Tlike an absurdly high price. We're glad to

mini-monitor.

52 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

 

We talked with him a lot after that, and ran a Rendezvous feature with him in UHF No. 43. We thought it was about time we talked with him again.

UHF: When you look back to the beginning, when the Totem line was just one model, does it seem an awfully long time ago?

Bruzzese: Actually not, because we still live with that same model, but it has been a wonderful journey, and it still is. The joy we got out of the Model One, we get from most of our other models.

UHF: Has the marketing side gotten easier as the line has grown? It must have been difficult when you had just one model.

Bruzzese: Without a doubt. It was dif- ficult to penetrate the market back in the late 1980’s. Back then the big speaker ruled, and a small speaker was out of the ordinary. Of course the addition of other models made the line extremely accept- able to the mainstream market.

UHF: The Mani-2 was the speaker we all thought would be called the Model Two. Tell us how you thought about going beyond the Model One.

Bruzzese: Actually the Mani-2 was brought out almost at the same time as the Rokk and the Tott. Those two were excellent in their own way, but the Mani-2 was supposed to be the flagship “monitor” speaker. Back then monitors had certain limitations, and the Mani-2 was totally different. No one else had tried a vented box with a double woofer inside. I wanted something that would coalesce correctly and would have an extremely low noise floor, with holo- graphic imaging, keeping that same emotional context and pace that I was always interested in.

UHF: Though it’s not obvious from the outside, the design of the Mani-2 is radically different.

Bruzzese: Yes. There’s no written theory on that type of speaker, very few parameters you could follow. Being largely self-taught in the engineering of speakers, I delved into things that had never been approached before, to produce the ultimate monitor. And it has survived the test of time. I think

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Koss 76 manual Totem MAN
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