5
Overview
(continued)
Because the conductor of a planar magnetic driver is essentially a long, thin wire, it
presents a purely resistive load to the amplifier. This is comparable to the simple
test loads that amplifier companies use when measuring their amplifiers to show
how terrific they are. As such, you can be assured that your amplifiers will sound
and work their best.
Authoritative, deep bass requires that you move a lot of air. We have chosen to
use dynamic woofers for the bass because they can provide excellent performance
at lower frequencies.
In order to get comparable bass performance from a planar magnetic design, you
would need to have a huge speaker that would be impractical in most domestic
living spaces. It simply makes more sense to use the best transducer technology in
each area of the reproduced spectrum. One of Wisdom Audio’s strengths is in
seamlessly blending these technologies — particularly important given the high
standards set by our planar magnetic drivers.
Of course, the dynamic woofers themselves must be rather extraordinary in order
to “keep up” with the planar magnetic drivers right up to the crossover frequency.
Our woofers are different because they must be in order to do their job.
Specifically, we need highly dynamic, uncompressed bass (to keep up with the
planar magnetic drivers) that does not depend on a critical amount of enclosure
volume (since these speakers are mounted in your wall, and use the space inside
the wall as their “enclosure”). These two design goals require rather extraordinary
attention to myriad details.
The motor and suspension system of these woofers therefore includes all the critical
damping required for optimal operation. (In most speakers, the woofers depend on
the air trapped inside their enclosures as an additional “spring” to help them
behave properly.) Technically, this approach is known as an “infinite baffle”
design. In practice, the volume of air behind the speaker does not have to be
infinite, of course. It just needs to be large enough to not act like an acoustic
“spring”. Recommended and minimum enclosure volumes for the speaker are
listed in the Specifications section, and repeated on the Dimensions page.
Many speakers include a mid-bass “bump” in their response to give the illusion of
going deeper in the bass than they actually do. Unfortunately, this “bump” makes
blending them seamlessly with a high quality subwoofer almost impossible.
All Sage Series speakers have been designed for optimally at response to 80 Hz,
which is the most-common crossover frequency used with subwoofers.