Wisdom Audio P4i User Manual
Owner’s Manual
Insight Series P4i
Planar Magnetic Hybrid
Loudspeaker
Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................... 4
About this manual ..................................................................................................4
Registering your warranty.......................................................................................4
Description .....................................................................................................5
Planar magnetic drivers ..........................................................................................5
Free from compression....................................................................................5
More reliable ..................................................................................................5
Easy on ampliers ...........................................................................................6
Dynamic woofers...................................................................................................6
Extraordinary drivers .......................................................................................6
Optimized for subwoofers...............................................................................6
Friendly to Room Correction ..................................................................................6
Unpacking & Installing the P4i ........................................................................8
Simple installation instructions ...............................................................................8
Maximum wall thickness .................................................................................8
Room Correction ............................................................................................9
No room correction ...............................................................................................9
Systems with room correction ................................................................................9
Your P4i and Subwoofers ..............................................................................11
Using with subs ................................................................................................... 11
Using full range .................................................................................................... 11
Care & Maintenance .....................................................................................12
North American Warranty ............................................................................ 13
Standard Warranty ............................................................................................... 13
Harsh Conditions Use .......................................................................................... 13
Obtaining Service ......................................................................................... 14
Specications ................................................................................................15
P4i Dimensions ............................................................................................. 16
Notes ............................................................................................................. 17
Introduction
Congratulations on purchasing your Wisdom Audio loudspeakers. They incorporate many design features designed to give you decades of pleasure and
performance. Many of these design choices are uncommon among loudspeaker
manufacturers, and bear some explanation. See the following section entitled
“Description” for more information.
About this manual While we expect your local Wisdom Audio dealer to take care of the setup and
calibration of the system, we still recommend that you at least briey review this
and your other manuals in order to better understand your system’s full capabilities.
Registering your warranty You do not have to do anything to register your warranty for your Wisdom
Audio products. (Isn’t that a pleasant surprise?)
In the unlikely event that your loudspeakers ever require service, please contact
the dealer from whom you purchased them. Between their records and ours,
you should be all set.
However, please keep your sales receipt in a safe and easily found place. Should
you move or lose touch with your original dealer, it will serve as your proof of
purchase for warranty purposes.
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Description
Your Insight Series P4i loudspeakers take advantage of several
critical technologies to deliver a level of performance that has
never been available in a loudspeaker that intruded so modestly on your living space. In fact, this level of performance
has rarely been attained, regardless of the space and budget at
one’s disposal.
Since several of these technologies cannot readily be found
elsewhere, we will take the time to describe them in more
detail than would be necessary for more conventional designs.
Planar magnetic drivers Our planar magnetic drivers use an advanced, thin lm mem-
brane to move the air. This lm can respond instantly to the
smallest detail in the signal. It has vastly less inertia than traditional “cone & dome” drivers, so the signal is never blurred in
any way.
The motive force is provided by a “voice coil” that is printed
on the lm, which is suspended in a strong magnetic eld provided
by powerful magnets behind and in front
of the lm. The ratio of available force to
the moving mass is huge, which means that
the diaphragm does exactly what it is told:
nothing more, nothing less.
Free from compression One of the most remarkable things about the sound of well-designed planar
magnetic speakers is their lack of thermal or dynamic compression. There are
several reasons for this:
• The lightweight diaphragm responds quickly to even the smallest
signals, yet is robust enough to handle a great deal of power.
• The voice coil is laid out at and is exposed to the air on both
sides; the large resulting surface area dissipates heat extremely
quickly and efciently.
• Since heat does not build up in the voice coil (as it does in conventional dynamic drivers), the load seen by the amplier does
not change at high power levels.
When you become accustomed to the sound of your new Insight Series P4i
speakers, conventional speakers sound a bit bland and lifeless. You may also
discover yourself hearing details at even modest levels on the P4i that were previously inaudible even at loud volumes on more conventional speakers.
More reliable The “voice coil” in the planar magnetic driver is spread out over a large, at area
that is exposed to the open air. As such, when a huge transient comes along,
any heat that is generated is immediately dissipated. This compares quite favorably to other designs in which the voice coil is buried inside a massive piece of
metal, where the heat has effectively no place to go.
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The excellent heat dissipation of these drivers makes them remarkably reliable.
Planar magnetic speakers can handle a great deal of power without undue stress
or audible strain. In fact, for a given size, they can handle many times the power
of a traditional dynamic driver.
Easy on ampliers Because the conductor of a planar magnetic driver is essentially a long, thin
wire, it presents a purely resistive load to the amplier. This is comparable to the
simple test loads that amplier companies use when measuring their ampliers
to show how terric they are. As such, you can be assured that your ampliers
will sound and work their best.
Dynamic woofers 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.
Extraordinary 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. Spe-
cically, 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 “innite
bafe” design. In practice, the volume of air behind the speaker does not have
to be innite, of course. It just needs to be large enough to not act like an acous-
tic “spring.” Recommended and minimum enclosure volumes for the speaker are
listed in the Specications section, and repeated on the Dimensions page.
Optimized for subwoofers 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”
make blending them seamlessly with a high quality subwoofer almost impossible.
All Insight Series speakers have been designed for optimally at response to 80
Hz, which is the most-common crossover frequency used with subwoofers.
Friendly to Room Correction It is impossible to separate the performance of a speaker from the room it is in.
No matter how well designed, a speaker will sound quite different in a carpeted
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