When I was offered the opportunity to review a Burmester product—the 216 stereo power amplifier—I accepted immediately, mainly out of curiosity. Berlin-based Burmester is an important hi-fi brand, but I knew very little about the company and their products. What better way to learn more than to review one of their products?
Burmester’s creation story
When you’re building a hi-fi system, there’s something right about starting with the preamp. It just makes sense. It’s what Dieter Burmester did in building a hi-fi company.
The preamplifier is the operational hub of any hi-fi system (not counting systems that don’t have a preamplifier), but that doesn’t fully capture the preamp’s import. The preamp is the brain but also the brainstem, the spinal cord, possibly the heart. Its impact on a system’s sound may be less obvious than that of the loudspeakers, but that impact is nonetheless fundamental, with emphasis on the root word, “fundament”: ground, foundation. (“Fundament,” I’ve just learned from an online dictionary, can also mean a person’s buttocks. Please try to forget that.)
Burmester started up in 1977 with the 777 preamplifier, which, as you can tell once you know Burmester’s nomenclature, came into existence during July (the seventh month) of that year. Dieter Burmester, an engineer and the company’s founder, was working in the medical equipment field as a consulting engineer. Dieter was also an audiophile. He was impressed with the performance of certain op-amps used in his test instruments. He assembled the 777 out of medical-equipment parts.
That’s a piece of the Burmester origin story: The preamp came first, was fundamental. But every interesting story can be looked at from different points of view. Looking at it from another point of view, the history of Burmester goes back to an earlier point in Dieter Burmester’s history. Dieter Burmester was a guitarist. His first instrument was electric bass. His tubed bass amplifier failed frequently. He studied electronics to figure out how to fix it. In time, he qualified as a radio and TV repair technician. Then he built his own, more reliable bass amplifier to take to gigs—and that was the start of his career in sound and electronics. If my math is right, this would have been around 1962, when he was 16 years old. You could trace the company’s history back to that. Bass, then, is fundamental: the second fundament.
Returning to that preamp: Dieter was happy with the 777. He decided to set up a company. But the bank he approached for financing was skeptical. It doubted a lone engineer
