Part 6: The Lower Level, Montreal, And Westmount Rooms
Robots, high-end audio exhibition rooms, plus audiophile rock 'n' roll.
Montreal Audiofest 2025 Show Report By Rick Becker

M3   Kin by Totem And Totem Acoustics (Continued)

Totem's Super Tribe will use a new mid-sized version of the full-range Torrent driver developed by Totem. They use a small capacitor on the supplementary tweeter to protect it, but the Torrent driver is run crossover-less, giving it great transparency. The small version is fitted to the Tribe, and the large one is for the Element series.

The buffalo speaks to the Native American theme of the company and the Bison series that includes this center channel for home theater.

Spotting this album cover, I asked Nico and learned Mike Bruzzese is his cousin.

The large boulder in the mural looked like it might roll out into the room. That was an older VTL preamp and power amp, a Manley Chinook phono stage, and an Aurender streamer. Had I looked more closely, I might have certified the turntable as a vintage Thorens. The speakers were pure Totem with the claw footers.

M4   Focal-Naim Canada
The Focal-Naim room was another that I visited late on Saturday, as you might surmise from the "Next Show at 5 p.m." sign by the entrance to the darkened inner room created with drapery to highlight the presentation of the Focal Diva active speaker. They had several other systems on display, but had trimmed their presentation down from previous years to keep the focus primarily on Focal speakers, Naim electronics, and Naim all-in-ones.

The Diva display of this all-in-one active speaker ($50k) was previously at the Toronto show last fall and at the Capital Audiofest 2024 show in November. It earned a Best Rooms Award both times. Here, I listened to a minute of pounding techno music and moved on. It does techno very well, I might add, if you care to throw wild dance parties. Focal let Enjoy the Music.com know that they are now promoting the Diva very heavily, and I expect ten years down the road, we will look at this as a benchmark design.

System 5 in the room featured Focal Sopra No.2 speakers ($27,298) driven by Naim's new Classic 200 series with the preamp/streamer, power amp, and separate power supply each going for $12k.

They had an entry-level rig starting at a bit over $5k with the Focal Theva No.3 speaker paired with a Naim Uniti CI-102. The system combination I liked best was the Focal Aria EVO X No.2 speaker paired with Musical Fidelity M6si and MX Stream for around $13.5k.

Many of the items on silent display were not well labeled…unless you had a cell phone handy.

This Musical Fidelity NuVista 800.2 amplifier caught my eye.

This Musical Fidelity M8xtt acrylic turntable featured a tonearm with an acrylic housing for the bearing, which was both elegant and unusual. I also noticed the massive footers and dual plinth design that suggested it might be a suspended platter.

This Focal speaker with an upward-firing driver was intriguing. In retrospect, I wonder if the blades pivoted up to cover the top driver when not in use.

Focal typically included their headphone display in this room, but with the birth of the EARVANA area at the show, they moved it to that specialty area, which I'll come to in the next Part of my coverage.

ARTYSAN Audio
Artysan Audio is a new company from Montreal, apparently making cables with unique plastic junction boxes at the ends and even in the middle of the cable, suggesting some kind of filtration.

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