plastic penguin said:
Fair comment, I'm like that too. I'm a bit dubious about buying before auditioning. The only reason why I'm tempted by the Totems is because the 'Arros' sound wonderful with the Pulse. So I'm banking on it being very similar tonally.
I know you like your sound fairly smooth so the natural speaker upgrade would be either these (albeit big stand mounts)
http://www.whathifi.com/review/spendor-sp2-3r2 or Harbeths.
pp, you indeed know me well. Before I purchased Spendor SA-1 for my Pulse II I have struggled between SA-1 and SP2/3R2. In view of the price tag of SP2/3R2 I choosed SA-1 at that time. I have upgraded my Pulse II to Tucanna II, in the near future when I decided to change my speakers I can say SP2/3R2 is on top of my list.
Presently I am testing my Antila IIS using XLR cable. Overall the music from this CDP is very very smooth. It produces better HF, much tighter and extended bass than my OPPO. The sounstaging and music separation are excellent. The mid range are exceptionally smooth. Overall the music reproduced are very pleasant to my ears, at low and high volume. I can only say this CDP performs well above my expectation and I don't expect it can beat my OPPO by that much !!