Totem Acoustic Sttaf Floorstanders — Maple, Made in Canada

Totem Acoustic Sttaf — Hand-Built in Montreal, Upgraded on Our Bench, in the Maple Totem Charged Extra For

A slim, hand-built Canadian floorstander that has been quietly outperforming much larger speakers for two decades, in the Maple veneer Totem charged extra for, and upgraded on our own bench before listing.

The Design

Totem Acoustic build in Montreal, and the Sttaf is a fair summary of what the company believes. Rather than a big cabinet with big drivers, it is a narrow column — six and a third inches wide — containing a single 5.5-inch long-throw bass-mid driver and a one-inch textile dome, and almost all of the engineering effort has gone into the box rather than the parts list. The chassis is a full mono-shell, hand-assembled, with interlocking mitred joints and borosilicate damping through the interior. The crossover is hard-wired rather than sat on a circuit board, using large-gauge air-core coils chosen so the network does not saturate in the vocal range when the music gets demanding.

What the Design Buys You

The point of all that is coherence. A two-way with one small driver has no crossover in the middle of the human voice and no second woofer to smear the timing, and Totem tuned the rear-ported cabinet to reach down to 39 Hz — a figure that reads like a misprint next to the cabinet’s dimensions until you hear it. What you get is a speaker that images unusually wide for its size, sits comfortably within a foot of a rear wall where most floorstanders cannot, and disappears in a way that big boxes rarely manage.

What It Is Not

It should be said plainly what this is not. A 5.5-inch driver in a slim cabinet has limits, and reviewers have consistently noted that the Sttaf’s bass grip and outright loudness are where those limits show. This is a speaker happiest at civilised levels in a small to medium room, playing music properly, rather than one for filling a large space at volume. Within that brief it is exceptional, and it is the reason people keep them for twenty years.

Setup

Two details reward a little care in setup. The bases are designed to be mass-loaded — five to ten pounds of sand or shot in each cabinet — which meaningfully firms up the bottom end and is worth doing rather than skipping. And Totem’s recommended placement is one to four feet from the rear wall with four to ten feet between the pair, which is a wider window than most floorstanders allow.

The Radique Upgrades

This pair leaves here fitted with two of our own upgrades. The factory bi-wire straps have been replaced with a set of Radique Audio Bi-Wire Bridges — hand-assembled in Canada, high-purity copper in a black and red braided sleeve, gold-plated brass banana plugs on one end and matching spades on the other, in colour-coded anodised housings so polarity is obvious behind a crowded rack. They sell on their own for $125, and they are included here. Underneath, the cabinets sit on Radique Audio High Density Felt Pads in our signature Magenta — a full 5 mm of dense felt rather than the fluffy sort that compresses and slides, which both protects hardwood from the fine rings that speaker bases leave behind and takes a little of the cabinet’s vibration out of the floor.

Totem Claws Available Separately

If you want to take the isolation further, we also have a complete set of six Totem Claws in silver available separately — Totem’s own decoupling foot, machined from solid aluminium, three per cabinet, with their self-tapping screws and ball bearings all present. They fit the Sttaf’s base directly and need no threaded insert. Because the screws make it a permanent fitting we have deliberately left them off and left the choice where it belongs, with whoever ends up owning these.

Condition

The pair is finished in Maple, one of the four real wood veneers Totem offered and the lightest and most distinctive of them, and is graded Very Good cosmetically. Every speaker that comes through here is bench-tested in-house before it is listed.

Originally retailed new for $2200 plus HST (about $1,585 USD).

Hand-built in Montreal, small enough to live with, capable of imaging that normally costs several times this, and upgraded here with $130 of our own hardware before it went on the shelf.

Available for pickup in Kanata, or shipped across Canada and internationally — we have sent equipment to fifteen countries in the past year, each piece packed in-house in 275 lb test double-wall boxes. Live shipping rates for your address are calculated at checkout. Backed by Radique Audio’s Bumper-to-Bumper Warranty and our Perpetual Trade-Back Program. Available for audition by appointment in Kanata.

Totem Acoustic Sttaf Specifications

• Design: Two-way rear-ported floorstanding loudspeaker
• Woofer: 5.5 inch / 140 mm long throw
• Tweeter: 1 inch / 25 mm textile dome
• Crossover frequency: 2.5 kHz, 2nd order
• Frequency response: 39 Hz to 22 kHz, plus or minus 3 dB
• Sensitivity: 88 dB
• Nominal impedance: 8 ohms
• Recommended amplifier power: 20 to 100 watts
• Maximum SPL: 103 dB peak in an average listening room (12 x 20 ft / 4 x 6 m)
• Terminals: Bi-wireable, fitted with Radique Audio Bi-Wire Bridges
• Mass loading: 5 to 10 lb / 2.3 to 4.5 kg per cabinet
• Recommended placement: 1 to 4 ft from rear wall, 4 to 10 ft apart
• Cabinet: Full mono-shell hand-assembled chassis, interlocking mitred joints, borosilicate damping, hard-wired crossover
• Finish: Maple veneer
• Manufactured in: Montreal, Canada
• Dimensions: (Width x Height x Depth) 6.3 x 33.5 x 9.5 inches (160 x 850 x 242 mm)
• Weight: 42 lbs (19.1 kg) each

✅ Buy With Confidence — The Radique Promise

Backed by Radique Audio’s Bumper-to-Bumper Warranty and our Perpetual Trade-Back Program. When you’re ready to move on, we’ll take it back. That’s the Radique difference.

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